808
Opinion of Scalia, J.
pedestrian right-of-way, between the street and the clinic's parking lot, to slow down or even, occasionally, to stop momentarily while pedestrians got out of the way. As far as appears from the court's findings, all of these results were produced, not by anyone intentionally seeking to block on-coming traffic, but as the incidental effect of persons engaged in the activities of walking a picket line and leafletting on public property in front of the clinic. There is no factual finding that petitioners engaged in any intentional or purposeful obstruction.
Now let us compare these activities with the earlier injunction, violation of which is the asserted justification for the speech-free zone. Walking the return leg of the picket line on the paved portion of Dixie Way (instead of on the sidewalk), and congregating on the unpaved portion of that street, may, for all we know, violate some municipal ordinance (though that was not alleged, and the municipal police evidently did not seek to prevent it); but it assuredly did not violate the earlier injunction, which made no mention of such a prohibition. Causing the traffic along Dixie Way to slow down "in response to the congestion" is also irrelevant; the injunction said nothing about slowing down traffic on public rights-of-way. It prohibited the doing (or urging) of only three things: (1) "physically abusing persons entering, leaving, working or using any services" of the abortion clinic (there is no allegation of that); (2) "trespassing on [or] sitting in" the abortion clinic (there is no allegation of that); and (3) "blocking, impeding or obstructing ingress into or egress from" the abortion clinic.
Only the last of these has any conceivable application here, and it seems to me that it must reasonably be read to refer to intentionally blocking, impeding, or obstructing, and not to such temporary obstruction as may be the normal and incidental consequence of other protest activity. That is obvious, first of all, from the context in which the original injunction was issued—as a response to petitioners' threatened
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