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Government Identity Speech Programs: Understanding And Applying The New Walker Test, Leslie Gielow Jacobs

Leslie Gielow Jacobs

In Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., the Court extended its previous holding in Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summum, that a city’s donated park monuments were government speech, to the privately proposed designs that Texas accepts and stamps onto its specialty license plates. The placement of the program into the new doctrinal category is significant because the selection criteria for government–private speech combinations that produce government speech are “exempt from First Amendment scrutiny.” By contrast, when the government selects private speakers to participate in a private speech forum, its criteria must be reasonable in light of …