Cite as: 512 U. S. 753 (1994)
Opinion of Scalia, J.
portions of the injunction while disallowing others. That appearance is deceptive. The entire injunction in this case departs so far from the established course of our jurisprudence that in any other context it would have been regarded as a candidate for summary reversal.
But the context here is abortion. A long time ago, in dissent from another abortion-related case, Justice O'Connor, joined by then-Justice Rehnquist, wrote:
"This Court's abortion decisions have already worked a major distortion in the Court's constitutional jurisprudence. Today's decision goes further, and makes it painfully clear that no legal rule or doctrine is safe from ad hoc nullification by this Court when an occasion for its application arises in a case involving state regulation of abortion. The permissible scope of abortion regulation is not the only constitutional issue on which this Court is divided, but—except when it comes to abortion—the Court has generally refused to let such disagreements, however longstanding or deeply felt, prevent it from evenhandedly applying uncontroversial legal doctrines to cases that come before it." Thorn-burgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U. S. 747, 814 (1986) (citations omitted).
Today the ad hoc nullification machine claims its latest, greatest, and most surprising victim: the First Amendment.
Because I believe that the judicial creation of a 36-foot zone in which only a particular group, which had broken no law, cannot exercise its rights of speech, assembly, and association, and the judicial enactment of a noise prohibition, applicable to that group and that group alone, are profoundly at odds with our First Amendment precedents and traditions, I dissent.
I
The record of this case contains a videotape, with running caption of time and date, displaying what one must presume
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