Prior restraints—legal prohibitions on disseminating information before publication—are an odious burden on the freedom of expression and come with a “heavy presumption” against their constitutionality. Indeed, they are so disfavored in the law as to be virtually impossible to obtain outside of wartime.
Informal prior restraints—government pressure without formal sanction—are even more unconstitutional than formal ones, as the Supreme Court noted in Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963). In that case, the Court forbade the Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth from sending threatening letters to book distributors in an attempt to nudge the distributors into not carrying “obscene” material.
But that strong precedent didn’t stop Cook County (Chicago) Sheriff Thomas Dart and his crusade against Backpage.com, an online commerce site similar to Craigslist. Rather than trying to get a formal prior restraint from a court, Dart used his office, letterhead, and title to send letters threatening investigation to Visa and MasterCard (Backpage’s primary financial transaction processors) to pressure them into dropping Backpage as a customer. Dart justifies his actions by asserting that there have been “years of growth in the online sex trade,” “driving demand even higher and increasing the enslavement of prostituted individuals, including children” due to commercial sites like Backpage.com hosting “adult services” classified ads.
It worked: when Backpage sued to stop Sheriff Dart, the district court denied a preliminary injunction, accepting Dart’s claims and ruling that the public interest weighed against the website. Backpage.com appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/chicagos-sheriff-crusades-against-online-ads
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