Cite as: 530 U. S. 703 (2000)
Scalia, J., dissenting
the evil it sought to remedy." In Heffron v. International Soc. for Krishna Consciousness, Inc., 452 U. S. 640, 652 (1981), the Court upheld a regulation prohibiting the sale or distribution on the state fairgrounds of any merchandise, including printed or written material, except from a fixed location, because that precisely served the State's interest in "avoiding congestion and maintaining the orderly movement of fair patrons on the fairgrounds."
In contrast to the laws approved in those cases, the law before us here enacts a broad prophylactic restriction which does not "respon[d] precisely to the substantive problem which legitimately concern[ed]" the State, Vincent, supra, at 810—namely (the only problem asserted by Colorado), the obstruction of access to health facilities. Such prophylactic restrictions in the First Amendment context—even when they are content neutral—are not permissible. "Broad prophylactic rules in the area of free expression are suspect. . . . Precision of regulation must be the touchstone in an area so closely touching our most precious freedoms." NAACP v. Button, 371 U. S. 415, 438 (1963). In United States v. Grace, 461 U. S. 171 (1983), we declined to uphold a ban on certain expressive activity on the sidewalks surrounding the Supreme Court. The purpose of the restriction was the perfectly valid interest in security, just as the purpose of the restriction here is the perfectly valid interest in unobstructed access; and there, as here, the restriction furthered that interest—but it furthered it with insufficient precision and hence at excessive cost to the freedom of speech. There was, we said, "an insufficient nexus" between security and all the expressive activity that was banned, id., at 181—just as here there is an insufficient nexus between the assurance of access and forbidding unconsented communications within eight feet.4
4 The Court's suggestion, ante, at 730, that the restrictions imposed by the Colorado ban are unobjectionable because they "interfer[e] far less with a speaker's ability to communicate" than did the regulations involved
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