Specialty License Plates and the First Amendment
123 Harv. L. Rev. 1291 (2010)
(An excerpt is below. To view the full text, please use Westlaw, Lexis, a law library or alternative source.)
The law of specialty license plates is a central battleground in the still-unfolding jurisprudence of government speech. Undoubtedly, license plates implicate the expressive rights of the drivers who display them, but because their messages are so readily attributed to the issuing governments, they also implicate a government speech interest in avoiding inaccurate assumptions of state endorsement. Accordingly, specialty license plates constitute a hybrid speech category–a classification as yet unrecognized by the Supreme Court–in which both private and government speech interests are weighty enough to demand simultaneous recognition by courts. In this hybrid category, both the government and the private speaker should have a right to veto expression that would be attributed to them by reasonable observers, as the test for government speech recently suggested by Justice Souter implies.
