358
Syllabus
Held: The injunction provisions imposing "fixed buffer zone" limitations are constitutional, but the provisions imposing "floating buffer zone" limitations violate the First Amendment. Pp. 371-385. (a) Because Madsen v. Women's Health Center, Inc., 512 U. S. 753, bears many similarities to this case and because many of the parties' arguments depend on the application of Madsen here, the Court reviews that decision. In Madsen, the Court said that "standard time, place, and manner analysis is not sufficiently rigorous" for evaluating content-neutral injunctions that restrict speech, and held, instead, that the test is "whether the challenged provisions . . . burden no more speech than necessary to serve a significant government interest." Id., at 765. Pp. 371-374. (b) Petitioners' argument that no significant governmental interests support the injunction at issue is rejected. Given the factual similarity between this case and Madsen, the Court concludes that the governmental interests underlying the injunction there—ensuring public safety and order, promoting the free flow of traffic on streets and sidewalks, protecting property rights, and protecting a woman's freedom to seek pregnancy-related services, 512 U. S., at 767-768—also underlie the injunction here, and in combination are certainly significant enough to justify an appropriately tailored injunction to secure unimpeded physical access to the clinics. Pp. 374-376. (c) The floating buffer zones are struck down because they burden more speech than is necessary to serve the relevant governmental interests. Such zones around people prevent defendants—except for sidewalk counselors tolerated by the targeted individual—from communicating a message from a normal conversational distance or handing out leaflets on the public sidewalks. This is a broad prohibition, both because of the type of speech restricted and the nature of the location. Leafletting and commenting on matters of public concern are classic forms of speech that lie at the heart of the First Amendment, and speech in public areas is at its most protected on public sidewalks, a prototypical example of a traditional public forum. See, e. g., Boos v. Barry, 485 U. S. 312, 322. Although a record of abusive conduct sometimes makes a prohibition on classic speech in limited parts of a public sidewalk permissible, see, e. g., Madsen, supra, at 769-770, the Court need not decide whether the governmental interests involved would ever justify a separation zone measured by the distance between targeted individuals and protesters, since the fact that this broad speech prohibition "floats" renders it unsustainable on this record. Protesters on the public sidewalks who wish to communicate their message to a targeted individual and to remain as close as possible (while maintaining an acceptable conversational distance) must move as the individual moves, maintaining 15 feet
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