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Opinion of the Court
not require explanation. Leathers, supra, at 447. It is but one manifestation of a far broader principle: "Regulations which permit the Government to discriminate on the basis of the content of the message cannot be tolerated under the First Amendment." Regan v. Time, Inc., 468 U. S. 641, 648- 649 (1984). See also Police Dept. of Chicago v. Mosley, 408 U. S. 92, 95 (1972). In the context of financial regulation, it bears repeating, as we did in Leathers, that the government's ability to impose content-based burdens on speech raises the specter that the government may effectively drive certain ideas or viewpoints from the marketplace. 499 U. S., at 448- 449. The First Amendment presumptively places this sort of discrimination beyond the power of the government. As we reiterated in Leathers: " 'The constitutional right of free expression is . . . intended to remove governmental restraints from the arena of public discussion, putting the decision as to what views shall be voiced largely into the hands of each of us . . . in the belief that no other approach would comport with the premise of individual dignity and choice upon which our political system rests.' " Id., at 448-449 (quoting Cohen v. California, 403 U. S. 15, 24 (1971)).
The Son of Sam law is such a content-based statute. It singles out income derived from expressive activity for a burden the State places on no other income, and it is directed only at works with a specified content. Whether the First Amendment "speaker" is considered to be Henry Hill, whose income the statute places in escrow because of the story he has told, or Simon & Schuster, which can publish books about crime with the assistance of only those criminals willing to forgo remuneration for at least five years, the statute plainly imposes a financial disincentive only on speech of a particular content.
The Board tries unsuccessfully to distinguish the Son of Sam law from the discriminatory tax at issue in Arkansas Writers' Project. While the Son of Sam law escrows all of the speaker's speech-derived income for at least five years,
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