Law Commons^™

Compelled Speech And The Irrelevance Of Controversy, Seana Valentine Shiffrin

Pepperdine Law Review

NIFLA v. Becerra stealthily introduced a new First Amendment test for compelled speech that has injected chaos into the law of compelled disclosures. NIFLA reinterpreted the requirement that compelled disclosures contain only “purely factual and uncontroversial information” in a way that imbued independent force into the “uncontroversial” component of that test. Yet, the Court failed to supply criteria for what sort of purely factual information would fail to qualify as “uncontroversial information” and identified no important free speech concerns that this new prong protects. This Article distinguishes seven different interpretations of “uncontroversial information.” It then assesses them to ascertain whether …