Cite as: 532 U. S. 514 (2001)
Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting
information, if obtained lawfully, could be published with impunity. Cf. Seattle Times Co. v. Rhinehart, 467 U. S. 20, 34 (1984) (upholding under intermediate scrutiny a protective order on information acquired during discovery in part because "the party may disseminate the identical information . . . as long as the information is gained through means independent of the court's processes"). As the concerns motivating strict scrutiny are absent, these content-neutral restrictions upon speech need pass only intermediate scrutiny.
The Court's attempt to avoid these precedents by reliance upon the Daily Mail string of newspaper cases is unpersuasive. In these cases, we held that statutes prohibiting the media from publishing certain truthful information—the name of a rape victim, Florida Star v. B. J. F., 491 U. S. 524 (1989); Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn, 420 U. S. 469 (1975), the confidential proceedings before a state judicial review commission, Landmark Communications, Inc. v. Virginia, 435 U. S. 829 (1978), and the name of a juvenile defendant, Daily Mail, supra; Oklahoma Publishing Co. v. District Court, Oklahoma Cty., 430 U. S. 308 (1977) (per curiam)— violated the First Amendment. In so doing, we stated that "if a newspaper lawfully obtains truthful information about a matter of public significance then state officials may not constitutionally punish publication of the information, absent a need to further a state interest of the highest order." Daily Mail, supra, at 103. Neither this Daily Mail principle nor any other aspect of these cases, however, justifies the Court's imposition of strict scrutiny here.
Each of the laws at issue in the Daily Mail cases regulated the content or subject matter of speech. This fact alone was enough to trigger strict scrutiny, see United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group, Inc., 529 U. S. 803, 813 (2000) ("[A] content-based speech restriction . . . can stand only if it satisfies strict scrutiny"), and suffices to distinguish these antidisclosure provisions. But, as our synthesis of these
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