expressive conduct

In the predawn hours of June 21, 1990, petitioner R.A.V., then a juvenile, and several other teenagers assembled a crudely made cross by taping together broken chair legs and burned the cross inside the fenced yard of a black family that lived across the street from the house where R.A.V. was staying. Although this conduct could have been punished under several Minnesota statutes carrying significant penalties, the City of St. Paul chose to charge R.A.V. under the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance. The ordinance provides that whoever places on public or private property a symbol, object, appellation, characterization or graffiti, including but not limited to a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor. R.A.V. moved to dismiss the charge on the ground that the ordinance was substantially overbroad and impermissibly content-based and therefore facially invalid under the First Amendment, and the trial court granted the motion. The Minnesota Supreme Court reversed, construing the ordinance to reach only fighting words and concluding that it was not impermissibly content-based. This Court granted certiorari.

In 1982, the Community for Creative Non-Violence, a group dedicated to eliminating homelessness, and several of its adherents applied to the National Park Service for a permit to erect a symbolic tent city in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, and on the Mall as part of a wintertime demonstration intended to call attention to the plight of the homeless. The Park Service issued a renewable permit authorizing the erection of 20 tents in Lafayette Park that would accommodate 50 people and 40 tents on the Mall with a capacity of up to 100 people. The Park Service specifically denied the request that demonstrators be permitted to sleep in the tents. Lafayette Park is a roughly 7-acre square located across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. It is a garden park with formal landscaping of flowers and trees, with fountains, walks and benches. The Mall is a stretch of land running westward from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial some two miles away. It includes the Washington Monument, a series of reflecting pools, trees, lawns, and other greenery. Both areas were included in Major Pierre L'Enfant's original plan for the Capital. They are visited by vast numbers of visitors from around the country, as well as by large numbers of residents of the Washington metropolitan area. Under the regulations involved in this case, camping in National Parks is permitted only in campgrounds designated for that purpose. No such campgrounds have ever been designated in Lafayette Park or the Mall. Camping is defined as the use of park land for living accommodation purposes such as sleeping activities, or making preparations to sleep, or storing personal belongings, or making any fire, or using any tents or other structure for sleeping or doing any digging or earth breaking or carrying on cooking activities. CCNV and several individuals filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against the Park Service, its Director, and the Secretary of the Interior, alleging that the regulations violated the First Amendment. The District Court granted summary judgment in favor of the Government. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, sitting en banc, reversed. The Supreme Court granted the Government's petition for certiorari.

In December 1965, petitioners John F. Tinker, a 15-year-old high school student, his 13-year-old sister Mary Beth Tinker, a junior high school student, and Christopher Eckhardt, a 16-year-old high school student, all attending schools in Des Moines, Iowa, participated in a plan developed at a meeting at the Eckhardt home to wear black armbands during the holiday season and to fast on December 16 and New Year's Eve to publicize their objections to the hostilities in Vietnam and their support for a truce. The principals of the Des Moines schools became aware of the plan and on December 14, 1965, met and adopted a policy under which any student wearing an armband to school would be asked to remove it and, if refusing, would be suspended until returning without the armband. The petitioners were aware of this regulation. On December 16, 1965, Mary Beth Tinker and Christopher Eckhardt wore black armbands to their schools and were sent home and suspended. John Tinker wore his armband the next day and was similarly suspended. The petitioners did not return to school until after New Year's Day, when the planned period for wearing armbands had expired. Through their fathers, the petitioners filed a complaint in the United States District Court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 seeking an injunction restraining the respondent school officials and board members from disciplining them and seeking nominal damages. After an evidentiary hearing, the District Court dismissed the complaint. The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed the dismissal by an equally divided court without opinion. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to review the case.