HOW TO
LEGISLATION
BY DAVID HICKEY
Five Years Later Reanalyzing the impact of Reed v. Gilbert.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/ By SevenMaps
T
his summer, an important anniversary passed by with hardly any notice: The Supreme Court of the United States’ ruling in Reed v. the Town of Gilbert turned five. This is no mere historical note, at least not for our industry. In the last five years, Reed has turned sign regulations across the country upside down. And now, with other cases making their way through the courts that seek to expand or redefine Reed, we face another potential upending. First, a little context: Reed was a case in which the Town of Gilbert, Arizona had limited a church’s ability to use temporary directional signs. The church’s signs were treated differently than other kinds of temporary sign users. The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling affirmed that sign regulations cannot be content based and forced thousands of communities across America to revise their local ordinances
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to make sure they don’t violate the First Amendment rights of sign users. In the five years since Reed, ISA has worked with hundreds of local communities as they have reviewed and amended their sign codes to comply with the court’s decision. We’ve also trained thousands of local planners who had to navigate these complex issues through Webinars, workshops, and resources. ISA relies heavily on the peer-reviewed, university-led research from the Sign Research Foundation (SRF) for much of its work. Meanwhile the Reed decision has been reverberating throughout state and federal courts. In May, a case reached the Supreme Court that relies heavily on the logic of Reed. However, this case, Barr. American Association of Political Consultants, Inc., isn’t about signs but instead involved automated phone calls (“robocalls”). Congress had created an exception for
those calls that dealt with collecting government debt; political groups argued that distinction was content based. In California, freelance journalists want to apply Reed to the state’s controversial law AB 5, arguing that other professions have been exempted from the law’s onerous provisions. AB 5 limits how many assignments a freelancer can perform before being considered a full-time employee—proving just how far a court case like Reed can stretch. This case is currently before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. While those two cases are not specifically related to our industry, any court ruling that limits or expands Reed could have a direct impact. But let’s focus here on Reed’s continued application when it comes to signage, especially the on-premise vs. off-premise distinction. In 2017, Thomas v. Bright entailed a billboard owner (Thomas) winning a August 2020
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