United States v. Edge Broadcasting Co., 509 U.S. 418, 14 (1993)

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Cite as: 509 U. S. 418 (1993)

Opinion of the Court

by the extent to which it furthers the Government's interest in an individual case.

This is consistent with the approach we have taken in the commercial speech context. In Ohralik v. Ohio State Bar Assn., 436 U. S., at 462, for example, an attorney attacked the validity of a rule against solicitation "not facially, but as applied to his acts of solicitation." We rejected the appellant's view that his "as applied" challenge required the State to show that his particular conduct in fact trenched on the interests that the regulation sought to protect. We stated that in the general circumstances of the appellant's acts, the State had "a strong interest in adopting and enforcing rules of conduct designed to protect the public." Id., at 464. This having been established, the State was entitled to protect its interest by applying a prophylactic rule to those circumstances generally; we declined to require the State to go further and to prove that the state interests supporting the rule actually were advanced by applying the rule in Ohralik's particular case.

Edenfield v. Fane, 507 U. S. 761 (1993), is not to the contrary. While treating Fane's claim as an as applied challenge to a broad category of commercial solicitation, we did not suggest that Fane could challenge the regulation on commercial speech as applied only to himself or his own acts of solicitation.

C

We also believe that the courts below were wrong in holding that as applied to Edge itself, the restriction at issue was ineffective and gave only remote support to the Government's interest.

As we understand it, both the Court of Appeals and the District Court recognized that Edge's potential North Carolina audience was the 127,000 residents of nine North Carolina counties, that enough of them regularly or from time to time listen to Edge to account for 11% of all radio listening in those counties, and that while listening to Edge they heard

431

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