Cite as: 505 U. S. 672 (1992)
Opinion of Souter, J.
The claim to be preventing coercion is weak to start with. While a solicitor can be insistent, a pedestrian on the street or airport concourse can simply walk away or walk on. In any event, we have held in a far more coercive context than this one, that of a black boycott of white stores in Claiborne County, Mississippi, that "[s]peech does not lose its protected character . . . simply because it may embarrass others or coerce them into action." NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., 458 U. S. 886, 910 (1982). See also Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, 402 U. S. 415, 419 (1971) ("The claim that . . . expressions were intended to exercise a coercive impact on respondent does not remove them from the reach of the First Amendment. Petitioners plainly intended to influence respondent's conduct by their activities; this is not fundamentally different from the function of a newspaper"). Since there is here no evidence of any type of coercive conduct, over and above the merely importunate character of the open and public solicitation, that might justify a ban, see United States v. O'Brien, 391 U. S. 367 (1968); Claiborne Hardware Co., supra, at 912, the regulation cannot be sustained to avoid coercion.
As for fraud, our cases do not provide government with plenary authority to ban solicitation just because it could be fraudulent. "Broad prophylactic rules in the area of free expression are suspect," NAACP v. Button, 371 U. S. 415, 438 (1963), and more than a laudable intent to prevent fraud is required to sustain the present ban. See, e. g., Schaumburg v. Citizens for a Better Environment, 444 U. S. 620, 636-638 (1980) ("The Village, consistently with the First Amendment, may not label such groups 'fraudulent' and bar them from canvassing on the streets and house to house"); Riley, supra, at 800. The evidence of fraudulent conduct here is virtually nonexistent. It consists of one affidavit describing eight
may, of course, be congested locations where solicitation could severely compromise the efficient flow of pedestrians, the proper response would be to tailor the restrictions to those choke points.
713
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