Meeting the Sin Laws: Constitutional Law

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Meeting the Sin Laws

Musings on laws affecting adult entertainment, alcoholic beverages and other "vice" industries

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Last Entry: August 20, 2008 at 12:53:00

Chilling speech, Un-chilling beer

Posted on August 20, 2008
Last Friday the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued this decision.It concerns an Ohio liquor regulation (Rule 52) that bans "nudity" and "sexual activity" in alcohol-licensed establishments. As drafted, Rule 52 prohibits not only nudity in performances having literary, artistic or political value, it bans even ?the exposure of any device, costume, or covering which gives the appearance of or simulates? nudity...

Express [read "pierce"] yourself

Posted on August 16, 2008
Your bling is not you.The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued an unpublished decision yesterday concerning a Brevard County "School Board written policy that prohibits the wearing of non-otic pierced jewelry by students in the Brevard County public school system...

Another Georgia town celebrates closing of strip club

Posted on August 11, 2008
This picture will save at least 1,000 words: "Byron City Councilman Michael Chidester applauds as the Cafe Erotica sign falls Friday morning in Byron." And another 1,000 words: "Jeff Laborg, pastor at Second Baptist Church in Warner Robins, gives a shout and waves a Bible in the air as the Cafe Erotica sign comes down Friday morning in Byron...

Crisis averted for famous liquor license(s)

Posted on August 08, 2008
The Bellini cocktail will remain a menu item at Cipriani, where the drink achieved signature status. (You'll still need $20.95 to buy one, though.)The New York Times reports that the "State Liquor Authority voted 2 to 1 on Wednesday to accept the family?s $500,000 settlement offer, rather than revoke its liquor licenses for more than four dozen violations of state law at nine venues, including the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, Harry Cipriani at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and Cipriani Wall Street...

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Today's wine-shipping decision ...

Posted on August 07, 2008
... arrives courtesy of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.In this case the plaintiffs, who are described as "oenophiles who want easier access to wine from small vineyards in other states," challenged two provisions of Indiana law. These provisions state that wineries inside and outside Indiana may ship to customers, if (a) there is one face-to-face meeting at which the buyer?s age and other particulars can be verified; and (b) the vintner is not allowed to sell to retailers in any state as its own wholesaler...

Reverse Flow

Posted on August 07, 2008
"City owes $85,000 for pulling strip club's licence," reports TheSpec.com. According to the article, "[t]he city's licensing committee pulled the defunct strip club's licence in July 2006 because of inactivity. The decision, which was upheld by council, quashed plans to reopen the strip joint...

Another town buys an adult business

Posted on August 01, 2008
They're all the rage these days."A small town in northeast Georgia has bought a strip club, but it's not planning to get into the adult entertainment business," reports MSNBC.com here.The town of Lavonia is not alone; other cities have taken the plunge.

The Sound of Silence

Posted on July 20, 2008
Your application to plop an adult bookstore in our town's commercial shopping center is hereby ...Dennis Loring filed a "site plan application seeking to locate an adult, sexually oriented book and video store in a shopping plaza in North Haven." The commission said no...

Have you left your bag of firearms unattended?

Posted on July 04, 2008
Happy July 4th!!Are you flying over the holiday? If you're passing through Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Int'l Airport, you'll need to leave your "arms" at home. For now at least. Sound ridiculous? To GeorgiaCarry.Org, Inc. and Georgia Representative Timothy Bearden (R - Villa Rica) it does...

Are obscenity prosecutions on the rise?

Posted on June 23, 2008
Maybe. Or maybe not."What?s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer" appears in tomorrow's edition of The New York Times. The question is whether Internet data --- specifically, Google search results --- may be used at trial to gauge "community standards," whatever that means...

Georgia's wine sales to go online

Posted on June 09, 2008
Georgia winemakers want your home address and (unexpired) MasterCard number.The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports here that, "[s]tarting July 1, Georgia residents can have any winery ship to them up to 12 cases a year as long as someone 21 or older signs for the shipment...

Borderless Bookstore

Posted on June 08, 2008
I like happily-ever-afters.In West Chester, Pennsylvania, the "St. Agnes Church has dropped its challenge to a zoning hearing board decision involving Feminique Boutique, a sex novelty shop near the church," reports the DailyLocal.com here. Why? Well, we can only guess, but there is no definition for what the store is (i...

Slots & Sovereignty

Posted on June 04, 2008
It's a video poker case.Over at SCOTUSblog, they're betting that that it is taken up by the Supreme Court. I won't (meaning, I can't) handicap the odds. The case concerns Jimmy Martin and his company, Lucky Strike, which have sought to enjoin enforcement of two South Carolina statutes criminalizing certain "device[s] pertaining to games of chance...

Dem is fight'n words

Posted on May 14, 2008
This free-speech lawsuit requires us to determine the present scope of the ?fighting words?doctrine. The setting is a neighborhood feud. The case features an unsightly, 38-foot recreational vehicle stored on a residential driveway in suburban Chicago, a neighborhood petition drive to force its removal, and a derogatory Halloween yard display erected in retaliation against the neighbors who led the petition drive...

Alcohol & Big Business

Posted on May 11, 2008
"Michael Cortez never dreamed he'd be heading to the highest court in the state over a six-pack of beer. But the vice president and general counsel for Sheetz Inc. will do just that Wednesday when his central Pennsylvania convenience-store chain appears before the Supreme Court to resolve a dispute over where beer can be sold in the state...

The only thing we have to fear, is beer itself ...

Posted on April 14, 2008
... and not one State's attempt to jack-up the tax on it -- or says Orin Kerr of The Volokh Conspiracy here. A California assemblyman, Jim Beall, has "proposed raising the beer tax by $1.80 per six-pack, or 30 cents per can or bottle. The current tax is 2 cents per can...

Milwaukee's Best Light -- $3.79 for a 16 oz. six-pack!

Posted on April 03, 2008
"A federal judge has overturned Virginia's decades-old ban on alcohol-related advertising in college newspapers, saying that the law violates the student publications' constitutional right to free speech," reports AP in the Washington Post here. Most alcohol-advertising bans are sitting ducks for constitutional challenge if they're (threatned to be) enforced because there's typically little (if any) evidence supporting the speech ban...

Bang

Posted on March 29, 2008
"Guns, Fear, the Constitution, and the Public's Health," written by Garen J. Wintemute, M.D., M.P.H., will appear in the April 3 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. (HT to You Don't Say.)Dr. Wintemute notes that "the $2 billion annual costs of medical care for the victims of gun violence are dwarfed by an estimated overall economic burden, including both material and intangible costs, of $100 billion...

E-wine & ID

Posted on March 20, 2008
An interesting decision concerning Wine.com which you can access here (eVineyard Retail Sales-Massachusetts, Inc. vs. Alcoholic Bev. Control Comm'n, SJC-09948 March 18, 2008).One of the vinous Internet giant's wholly owned subsidiaries, eVineyard Retails Sales-Massachusetts, Inc...

Religion & Poles

Posted on March 18, 2008
(Source.) A follow-up to my post below. The picture is entitled, you guessed it, "Peep Show."Now that just ain't right.

Politics & Poles

Posted on March 18, 2008
This month Harper's Magazine is featuring Mr. Fish, 178 Cartoons from 2004 to 2008. Mr. Fish, we're told, "lives in Los Angeles, California. He never asked to be born. Occasionally, he laughs his head off. His mother has no idea what he's up to. She cries easily...

Percy L. Julian, Jr., Esq.

Posted on March 02, 2008
"The legal community ? particularly the First Amendment field ? lost a giant recently in Wisconsin-based civil rights attorney Percy L. Julian Jr., who died Feb. 24 in Madison at age 67," laments David L. Hudson, Jr. of the First Amendment Center here...

Stuff

Posted on February 23, 2008
"Breasts are not genitalia, and drivers don't gawk at the word 'love' ? a First Amendment problem," is the title of an Althouse post. In case you're wondering, the buttocks is not genitalia either, although some have believed it so."Millions May Be at Stake in Suit Over Hit NBC Game Show" appears in a Law...

Texas sexual device ban held unconstitutional

Posted on February 13, 2008
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals just reviewed Texas's obscenity statute, and here's how the opinion begins:This case assesses the constitutionality of a Texas statute making it a crime to promote or sell sexual devices. The district court upheld the statute?s constitutionality and granted the State?s motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim...

Georgia law continues to honor the Sabbath

Posted on February 12, 2008
"Despite public sentiment, Sundays likely to stay dry for now," is an article which appears in today's Atlanta Journal Constitution. If you haven't heard, Georgia is contemplating (again) a Sunday sales bill that would allow communities to decide whether they want to allow beer, wine and liquor retail package sales on Sundays...

Virginia Beach police seize photos from Abercrombie store

Posted on February 03, 2008
If I didn't know Virginia Beach, I'd have guessed this was a publicity stunt. But it's not. According to the article from Hampton Road's PilotOnline.com (via The Drudge Report),Police, saying they were responding to citizen complaints, carted away two large promotional photographs from the Abercrombie & Fitch store in Lynnhaven Mall on Saturday and cited the manager on obscenity charges...

I like what you're saying, so I won't zone you out.

Posted on February 01, 2008
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy Ilya Somin has posted that Berkeley is "considering enacting a zoning ordinance to restrict [military recruiters'] location[s] in much the same way as other cities use zoning to restrict or ban businesses selling pornography...

Everything is new(d) again

Posted on January 31, 2008
I've been working and playing.My playtime has been with our first baby, Ms. Audrey Jane Wiggins. She's a hoot. Born on January 8, she's been a non-stop machine, keeping her parents (especially mom) busy changing, feeding, rocking, gazing and laughing...

"Rumrunners, Moonshiners and Bootleggers" is ...

Posted on December 08, 2007
... the name of The History Channel program that I just watched. The promo:Heroes who fight tax collectors and moral crusaders, or just common criminals? Like it or not, America was built by rumrunners, moonshiners, and bootleggers--even founding father John Hancock was a smuggler...

I was at the library, Ociffer

Posted on December 03, 2007
After pulling over a weaving car, the officer asks, "Have you been drinking?" The driver answers yes. Then the officer asks, "Where?" Well, look out if your establishment's name is the next sound heard. I just read "N.J. Sharpens Liquor-law Policing," in USA Today...

Among the ABA Journal's Blawg 100

Posted on November 29, 2007
This is cool: Editors of the ABA Journal have selected Meeting the Sin Laws as one of the top 100 best websites by lawyers, for lawyers. Lawyers are being asked to vote on their favorites in each of the Blawg 100?s 12 categories. Voting ends Jan. 2, 2008...

The "adult" in adult entertainment

Posted on November 23, 2007
If you're a grammar snob, or maybe you're just terrified of sounding less-than-literate, check out The Grammarphobia Blog. Yesterday's entry: adult entertainment. There we learn that "[t]he use of 'adult? as a euphemism for sexually explicit (as in 'adult cinema' or 'adult entertainment') dates from only 1958, according to the OED...

Which year(s) were YouPorn?

Posted on November 19, 2007
An interesting article, Obscene Losses, by Claire Hoffman appears in this November's online edition of Conde Nast Portfolio. It begins:DVD sales are in free fall. Audiences are flocking to pornographic knockoffs of YouTube, especially a secretive site called YouPorn...

Well, we didn't try to suppress speech ...

Posted on November 19, 2007
... even if Judge Kanne of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals says, "yes, you probably did." This opinion is hot off the presses. In throwing out the Village of Washington Park's alcohol-ban in adult entertainment establishments, the Court writes:Because the purpose of the ban on alcohol consumption in newly licensed establishments was to prevent competition,strict scrutiny applies...

If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em

Posted on November 07, 2007
The City of Warren (a suburb of Detroit) has bought an adult bookstore:The city of Warren has been known to purchase private businesses to aid long-term development goals. But city officials broke new ground with their recent purchase of an adult bookstore...

The Mild, Mild West

Posted on October 28, 2007
From the Seventh Court of Appeals of Texas comes this case. It concerns Kenneth Smartt, who began operating a business involving nude dancers (Xoticas) outside the city limits of Laredo in 1995. In 1998, Laredo annexed the property. Four years later, Laredo amended a previously existing ordinance to require those operating sexually oriented businesses to obtain a license and to refrain from conducting operations within 1,000 feet of a residential area...

Insight from the Inside: Dissenting Opinions

Posted on October 23, 2007
This past Sunday (10/21) I attended the Leo & Berry Eizenstat Memorial Lecture at the Ahavath Achim Syngogue. The guest of honor? None other than The Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg. What a superb Sunday outing. You can read about the speech here. Justice Ginsburg spoke about the importance of dissenting opinions and the role that they play in the SCOTUS's jurisprudence...

The Party of the First Part

Posted on October 15, 2007
I just finished reading The Party of the First Part, by Adam Freedman. What a super book. I wasn't sure what to expect, given that reading about 'words' and their origins can be like, well, yucky. None of that here. Mr. Freedman's writing is devilishly sharp, crisp and probing while maintaining a light feel...

Today's ban-out

Posted on September 05, 2007
"Fairview council votes to ban adult businesses despite attorney's advice that the ordinance would be unconstitutional," reports the Belleville-News Democrat here. It seems that the original, proposed ordinance had provided that only two businesses could open in the city...

Love Naught War

Posted on August 28, 2007
From Dr. Marty Klein's Sexual Intelligence (a wonderful blog), comes this this post: When Language is More Important than War. It's more on PBS's deliberation to self-censor the broadcast of Ken Burns' 14-hour documentary on WWII (which contains four instances of profanity -- war is ugly, after all) amid concerns from the Parents Television Council...

Ketching-up

Posted on August 26, 2007
It's a bird. It's a plane. It's ... a stripper? Granted, not exactly high heroics here, but some "strippers" at the Deja Vu club in Nashville were suspicious of $100 bills and called the police after a patron spent $600 of them. The man, who "authorities say used his computer to make fake $100 bills to buy lap dances at the strip club, has pleaded guilty to counterfeiting charges," according to the article...

Hiding is Dropping the ball

Posted on August 18, 2007
This case was recently decided by the Superior Court of New Jersey (Appellate Division).The petitioner, Fayette Fair Trade, Inc. ("Fayette"), which is wholly-owned by a shareholder, Rosario, appealed from a final determination of the Director of the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control ("ABC") suspending its license based on a finding of an undisclosed business interest in the license, and the licensee's failing to disclose that interest in the application, or providing false, misleading or inaccurate information about it...

Virtual Dollhouse

Posted on August 15, 2007
In Edgewater, Florida there's this house. Somewhere, maybe in Edgewater, there's this Web Site, "CocoDorm.com, where visitors can, for a fee, watch live video streams from the Edgewater house, where chiseled young males are paid $1,200, plus room, board and meals, to live in the two-story home for a month and have sex with each other on schedule," reports the Miami Herald here...

Liquor Law Watch

Posted on August 12, 2007
This decision comes down from the Montana Supreme Court.It concerns one bar's effort to transfer its liquor license to a soon-to-be casino in Great Falls. Before issuing the license, Montana's Department of Revenue ("DOR") published a notice of the license application in the newspaper...

Mr. Dead

Posted on August 07, 2007
This Seventh Circuit case is about horses. It is not pretty; in fact, it's kinda dark.Judge Posner, writing for the majority, begins, "Cavel International, the principal appellant (we can ignore the others), produces horsemeat for human consumption. The plant at which it slaughters the horses is in Illinois...

Spam

Posted on August 05, 2007
This week's issue of The New Yorker includes this article, entitled "Damn Spam." Written by Michael Spector, the article explores the federal government's attempt to rid -- or at least curb -- that most-annoying affliction suffered by e-mailers across the globe: spam...

Not-so-sinful: Dogs

Posted on July 25, 2007
"If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman's pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog." -- George Bernard Shaw

Mommy, this commercial is making me thirsty...

Posted on July 21, 2007
... so please give me your purse -- I'll need your money, your car keys and my fake I.D. card.This opinion was issued this week from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. The plaintiffs are the parents of minor children, and the defendants are (among others) domestic manufacturers and importers of alcoholic beverages, including Anheuser-Busch, Inc...

Irrebuttably rebuttable

Posted on July 12, 2007
From the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals comes this decision.The appeal concerns The Lion's Den, which opened at a rest stop off of Interstate 70 in Dickinson County, Kansas in September 2003. According to the opinion, The Lion's Den is probably the first sexually oriented business in the County in at least 25 years, and it may be the first such business in County history...

Newsflash: strip clubs run legitimate businesses

Posted on July 08, 2007
Do I sound crass? Forgive me, but I'm hardly surprised when stories like this sell ink. In a special report ("The Naked Truth about Strip Clubs"), William Sherman for the NY Daily News reports that "there are about 3,600 strip clubs nationwide," and "from a business point of view, it's all like Las Vegas was in the early '70s...

Inadvertent martyrdom

Posted on July 01, 2007
"A porn actress who claimed she performed oral sex on a state trooper who stopped her for speeding lost her chance to avoid the ticket he issued because she failed to appear in court Friday," reports USA Today here. Two quick comments: I thought that kinda thing happened only in books and movies...

Going once, going twice ... sold!!!

Posted on July 01, 2007
"His topless nightclub was only open for a few days, but a businessman in Pasadena is walking away with a $1.5 million tip from the city to shut it down, and turn the property over for re-use, it was reported Saturday," reports CBS News here. You can read a detailed story here, courtesy of the Pasadena-Star News...

Life's a beach sometimes

Posted on June 29, 2007
Two federal, appellate opinions concerning adult entertainment were issued this week.From the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, there is Forty One News, Inc. v. County of Lake. Long story short: 41 News, an adult book and video store, sued the county under 42 U...