800
Opinion of Scalia, J.
"burden no more than necessary" is not nearly as demanding as the requirement that it be couched in the "narrowest terms that will accomplish [a] pin-pointed objective." That the Court should cite this case as its principal authority is an admission that what it announces rests upon no precedent at all.
III
A
I turn now from the Court's selection of a constitutional test to its actual application of that test to the facts of the present case. Before doing that, however, it will be helpful—in order to demonstrate how far the Court has departed from past practice—to consider how we proceeded in a relatively recent case that did not involve the disfavored class of abortion protesters. NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., 458 U. S. 886 (1982), involved, like this case, protest demonstrations against private citizens mingling political speech with (what I will assume for the time being existed here) significant illegal behavior.4
Writing for the Court, Justice Stevens summarized the events giving rise to the Claiborne litigation (id., at 898- 906): A local chapter of the NAACP, rebuffed by public officials of Port Gibson and Claiborne County in its request for redress of various forms of racial discrimination, began a boycott of local businesses. During the boycott, a young black man was shot and killed in an encounter with Port Gibson police and "sporadic acts of violence ensued." Id., at 902. The following day, boycott leader Charles Evers told a group that boycott violators would be disciplined by their own people and warned that the sheriff "could not sleep with boycott violators at night." Ibid. He stated at a second
4 Claiborne Hardware involved both monetary damages and an injunction, but that is of no consequence for purposes of the point I am making here: that we have been careful to insulate all elements of speech not infected with illegality.
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