International Soc. for Krishna Consciousness, Inc. v. Lee, 505 U.S. 672, 18 (1992)

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Cite as: 505 U. S. 672 (1992)

Opinion of O'Connor, J.

Port Authority is no more directly related to facilitating air travel than are the types of activities in which the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Inc. (ISKCON), wishes to engage. See Jews for Jesus, supra, at 576 ("The line between airport-related speech and nonairport-related speech is, at best, murky"). In my view, the Port Authority is operating a shopping mall as well as an airport. The reasonableness inquiry, therefore, is not whether the restrictions on speech are "consistent with . . . preserving the property" for air travel, Perry, supra, at 50-51 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted), but whether they are reasonably related to maintaining the multipurpose environment that the Port Authority has deliberately created.

Applying that standard, I agree with the Court in No. 91- 155 that the ban on solicitation is reasonable. Face-to-face solicitation is incompatible with the airport's functioning in a way that the other, permitted activities are not. We have previously observed that "[s]olicitation impedes the normal flow of traffic [because it] requires action by those who would respond: The individual solicited must decide whether or not to contribute (which itself might involve reading the solicitor's literature or hearing his pitch), and then, having decided to do so, reach for a wallet, search it for money, write a check, or produce a credit card. . . . As residents of metropolitan areas know from daily experience, confrontation by a person asking for money disrupts passage and is more intrusive and intimidating than an encounter with a person giving out information." Kokinda, 497 U. S., at 733-734 (plurality opinion) (citations omitted); id., at 739 (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment) (accepting Postal Service's judgment that, given its past experience, "in-person solicitation deserves different treatment from alternative forms of solicitation and expression"); Heffron, supra, at 657 (Brennan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (upholding partial restriction on solicitation at fairgrounds because of state interest "in protecting its fairgoers from fraudulent, deceptive, and mis-

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