616
ASSOCIATES, INC.
Opinion of the Court
frauded." 487 U. S., at 795. We anticipated that North Carolina law enforcement officers would be "ready and able" to enforce the State's antifraud law. Ibid.
Riley presented a further issue. North Carolina law required professional fundraisers to disclose to potential donors, before asking for money, the percentage of the prior year's charitable contributions the fundraisers had actually turned over to charity. Ibid. The State defended this disclosure requirement as a proper means to dispel public mis-perception that the money donors gave to professional fund-raisers went in greater-than-actual proportion to benefit charity. Id., at 798.
This Court condemned the measure as an "unduly burdensome" prophylactic rule, an exaction unnecessary to achieve the State's goal of preventing donors from being misled. Id., at 800. The State's rule, Riley emphasized, conclusively presumed that "the charity derive[d] no benefit from funds collected but not turned over to it." Id., at 798. This was "not necessarily so," the Court said, for charities might well benefit from the act of solicitation itself, when the request for funds conveyed information or involved cause-oriented advocacy. Ibid.
The Court noted in Riley that North Carolina (like Illinois here) required professional fundraisers to disclose their professional status. Id., at 799; see Ill. Comp. Stat., ch. 225, § 460/17(a) (2001); supra, at 609, n. 4, 611, n. 6. That disclosure, the Court said, effectively notified contributors that a portion of the money they donated would underwrite solicitation costs. A concerned donor could ask how much of the contribution would be turned over to the charity, and under North Carolina law, fundraisers would be obliged to provide that information. Riley, 487 U. S., at 799 (citing N. C. Gen. Stat. § 131C-16 (1986)). But upfront telephone disclosure of the fundraiser's fee, the Court believed, might end as well as begin the conversation: A potential contributor who thought the fee too high might simply hang up. 487 U. S., at 799-
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