576
Opinion of Thomas, J.
speech that normally receive reduced First Amendment protection, or no First Amendment protection at all, we have never held that the government may regulate speech within those categories in any way that it wishes. Rather, we have said "that these areas of speech can, consistently with the First Amendment, be regulated because of their constitutionally proscribable content." R. A. V. v. St. Paul, 505 U. S. 377, 383 (1992). Even when speech falls into a category of reduced constitutional protection, the government may not engage in content discrimination for reasons unrelated to those characteristics of the speech that place it within the category. For example, a city may ban obscenity (because obscenity is an unprotected category, see, e. g., Roth v. United States, 354 U. S. 476 (1957)), but it may not ban "only those legally obscene works that contain criticism of the city government." R. A. V., supra, at 384.
In explaining the distinction between commercial speech and other forms of speech, we have emphasized that commercial speech is both "more easily verifiable by its disseminator" and less likely to be "chilled by proper regulation." Virginia Bd., 425 U. S., at 772, n. 24. These characteristics led us to conclude that, in the context of commercial speech, it is "less necessary to tolerate inaccurate statements for fear of silencing the speaker," and also that it is more "appropriate to require that a commercial message appear in such a form, or include such additional information, warnings, and disclaimers, as are necessary to prevent its being deceptive." Ibid. Whatever the validity of this reasoning, it is limited to the peculiarly commercial harms that commercial speech can threaten—i. e., the risk of deceptive or misleading advertising. As we observed in R. A. V.:
"[A] State may choose to regulate price advertising in one industry but not in others, because the risk of fraud (one of the characteristics of commercial speech that justifies depriving it of full First Amendment protection) is in its view greater there. But a State may not prohibit
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