Cite as: 535 U. S. 425 (2002)
Souter, J., dissenting
Young (and in Los Angeles as of 1978), and this new Los Angeles breakup requirement. In those two cases, the municipalities' substantial interest for purposes of intermediate scrutiny was an interest in choosing between two strategies to deal with crime or property value, each strategy tied to the businesses' location, which had been shown to have a causal connection with the secondary effects: the municipality could either concentrate businesses for a concentrated regulatory strategy, or disperse them in order to spread out its regulatory efforts. The limitations on location required no further support than the factual basis tying location to secondary effects; the zoning approved in those two cases had no effect on the way the owners of the stores carried on their adult businesses beyond controlling location, and no heavier burden than the location limit was approved by this Court.
The Los Angeles ordinance, however, does impose a heavier burden, and one lacking any demonstrable connection to the interest in crime control. The city no longer accepts businesses as their owners choose to conduct them within their own four walls, but bars a video arcade in a bookstore, a combination shown by the record to be commercially natural, if not universal. App. 47-51, 229-230, 242. Whereas Young and Renton gave cities the choice between two strategies when each was causally related to the city's interest, the plurality today gives Los Angeles a right to "experiment" with a First Amendment restriction in response to a problem of increased crime that the city has never even shown to be associated with combined bookstore-arcades standing alone. But the government's freedom of experimentation cannot displace its burden under the intermediate scrutiny standard to show that the restriction on speech is no greater than essential to realizing an important objective, in this case policing crime. Since we cannot make even a best guess that the city's breakup policy will have any effect on crime
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