430
Opinion of the Court
advances the governmental interest in enforcing the restriction in nonlottery States, while not interfering with the policy of lottery States like Virginia. We think this would be the case even if it were true, which it is not, that applying the general statutory restriction to Edge, in isolation, would no more than marginally insulate the North Carolinians in the North Carolina counties served by Edge from hearing lottery ads.
In Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U. S. 781 (1989), we dealt with a time, place, or manner restriction that required the city to control the sound level of musical concerts in a city park, concerts that were fully protected by the First Amendment. We held there that the requirement of narrow tailoring was met if "the . . . regulation promotes a substantial government interest that would be achieved less effectively absent the regulation," provided that it did not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further the government's legitimate interests. Id., at 799 (internal quotation marks omitted). In the course of upholding the restriction, we went on to say that "the validity of the regulation depends on the relation it bears to the overall problem the government seeks to correct, not on the extent to which it furthers the government's interest in an individual case." Id., at 801.
The Ward holding is applicable here, for we have observed that the validity of time, place, or manner restrictions is determined under standards very similar to those applicable in the commercial speech context and that it would be incompatible with the subordinate position of commercial speech in the scale of First Amendment values to apply a more rigid standard to commercial speech than is applied to fully protected speech. Fox, supra, at 477, 478. Ward thus teaches us that we judge the validity of the restriction in this case by the relation it bears to the general problem of accommodating the policies of both lottery and nonlottery States, not
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