Mall free speech upheld

Of all the changes that have affected America in recent years, one that's inescapable is the decline of Main Street as it's been replaced with the commercial avenues of new: suburban shopping malls. Thus, almost everyone agrees that malls - even while privately owned - are generally a facility for public assembly.

Almost everyone, that is, except the owners of these gargantuan retail complexes. And conservatives. (As if most of the owners aren't conservative.) Theirs is a Bizarro World where bottom line tyranny rules the roost.

In 1979 the California Supreme Court told these pied pipers of poologgery to eat a dick. They ruled that malls are indeed public conveyances and that they can't bar the exercise of free speech on the premises. But the powerful mall owners can't be wrong, can they? So in the '90s they thought this ruling had worn off and decided it was a good time to start stifling free speech again. In 1998 an upscale mall in San Diego was the site of a protest by a union that demonstrated against the unfair labor practices of the right-wing San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper. The protesters handed out leaflets urging a boycott of a store in the mall that advertised in the paper.

But the mall wanted none of it, and they banned the union from the grounds.

Now - after a federal court bunked the case back to state court - the California Supreme Court has once again ruled that malls are a "public forum", in essence repeating its 1979 ruling that mall owners forgot about. Malls can impose "reasonable regulations." But they can't ban free speech altogether.

What's shocking is that it was only a 4 to 3 ruling - which shows how far from common legal principle the system has drifted.

Conservatives have already criticized the ruling against the mall as a taking of private property. One of the dissenters from the ruling, Justice Ming Chin (one of "Poopypants Pete" Wilson's appointees), even criticized the 1979 decision, saying that other states don't have a right to free speech at malls. Bull. And shit. The mall owners still own the malls, so it's not a taking. And any court in its right mind in any of the 50 states would probably also back mall free speech rights.

Hopefully this'll put the kibosh on the ideology of corporatism that increasingly has allowed malls to act outside the law.

(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/us/25mall.html)