810
Opinion of Scalia, J.
I almost forgot to address the facts showing prior violation of law (including judicial order) with respect to the other portion of the injunction the Court upholds: the no-noise-within-earshot-of-patients provision. That is perhaps because, amazingly, neither the Florida courts nor this Court makes the slightest attempt to link that provision to prior violations of law. The relevant portion of the Court's opinion, Part II-B, simply reasons that hospital patients should not have to be bothered with noise, from political protests or anything else (which is certainly true), and that therefore the noise restrictions could be imposed by injunction (which is certainly false). Since such a law is reasonable, in other words, it can be enacted by a single man to bind only a single class of social protesters. The pro-abortion demonstrators who were often making (if respondents' videotape is accurate) more noise than the petitioners, can continue to shout their chants at their opponents exiled across the street to their hearts' content. The Court says that "[w]e have upheld similar noise restrictions in the past," ante, at 772, citing Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U. S. 104 (1972). But Grayned involved an ordinance, and not an injunction; it applied to everyone. The only other authority the Court invokes is NLRB v. Baptist Hospital, Inc., 442 U. S. 773 (1979), which it describes as "evaluating another injunction involving a medical facility," ante, at 772, but which evaluated no such thing. Baptist Hospital, like Grayned, involved a restriction of general application, adopted by the hospital itself—and the case in any event dealt not with whether the government had violated the First Amendment by restricting noise, but with whether the hospital had violated the National Labor Relations Act by restricting solicitation (including solicitation of union membership).
Perhaps there is a local ordinance in Melbourne, Florida, prohibiting loud noise in the vicinity of hospitals and abortion clinics. Or perhaps even a Florida common-law prohibition applies, rendering such noisemaking tortious. But the
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