| Hoffman Estates v. The Flipside | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Argued December 9, 1981 Decided March 3, 1982 | |
| Full case name | Village of Hoffman Estates v. The Flipside, Hoffman Estates, Inc. |
| Citations | 455 U.S. 489 (more) 102 S. Ct. 1186; 71 L. Ed. 2d 362 |
| Argument | Oral argument |
| Opinion announcement | Opinion announcement |
| Case history | |
| Prior | Judgement for appellant, 485 F. Supp. 400 (N.D.Ill., 1980); rev'd, 639 F.2d 373, (7th Cir., 1981), certiorari granted, 452 U.S. 904 (1981) |
| Holding | |
| Municipal ordinance imposing licensing and other requirements on sale of drug paraphernalia was not facially an overbroad restriction on speech as overbreadth doctrine does not apply to commercial speech; facial challenge as vague fails where plaintiff cannot demonstrate law was impermissibly vague in all its applications, and as economic regulation providing only for civil penalties standard for vagueness is lower. Seventh Circuit reversed. | |
| Court membership | |
| |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Marshall, joined by Burger, Brennan, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist, O'Connor |
| Concurrence | White |
| Stevens took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. | |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. Amendment I | |
Hoffman Estates v. The Flipside, Hoffman Estates, Inc., 455 U.S. 489 (1982), is a United States Supreme Court decision concerning the vagueness and overbreadth doctrines as they apply to restrictions on commercial speech. The justices unanimously upheld an ordinance passed by a Chicago suburb that imposed licensing requirements on the sale of drug paraphernalia by a local record store. Their decision overturned the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Concerned that the sale of items such as bongs and rolling papers, along with books and magazines devoted to the era's drug culture promoted and encouraged illegal recreational drug use, the board of trustees of the village of Hoffman Estates, Illinois, passed an ordinance requiring that vendors of drug paraphernalia obtain a license to do so, as they lacked the power to ban their sale outright. As a condition of that license, they were required to keep a record of the name and address of anyone buying such items for inspection by the police at any time. One of the two stores it applied to, The Flipside, filed suit in federal court for the Northern District of Illinois, seeking to have the ordinance invalidated, claiming its scope was so wide and overbroad as to possibly prevent the store from selling the books and magazines, thus infringing its First Amendment rights.
Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote for the Supreme Court that the village's ordinance was neither vague nor overbroad since it clearly defined the items affected and only explicitly prohibited marketing that alluded to their use in consuming illegal controlled substances. Byron White wrote a separate concurrence arguing that the Court need only have considered the vagueness issue since the Seventh Circuit had not considered the overbreadth claim. John Paul Stevens took no part in the case.
In the wake of the case many more communities began enacting and enforcing drug-paraphernalia laws, greatly curtailing their sale. It has not had much impact since then, or outside that narrow area of law, but it did establish two important precedents for later cases concerning the overbreadth and vagueness doctrines. In the former area, it clarified an earlier ruling and stated explicitly that the doctrine does not apply to commercial speech; in the latter, it established that a statute challenged for vagueness on its face, prior to enforcement, must be "impermissibly vague in all its applications" for the plaintiff to prevail. It also established that laws regulating economic activity, already held to a lower standard for vagueness since businesspeople can reasonably be expected to know their industry and its products, have an even lower standard to meet when they only call for civil penalties.
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