In a recent Justia blog post, Dean Vikram David Amar and U.C. Davis Law professor Alan Brownstein discuss one of the most-watched cases of the Supreme Court’s upcoming Term, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The lawsuit questions whether Colorado’s public accommodations law—which prohibits covered persons from withholding goods, services, or facilities from an individual or group based on, among other things, sexual orientation—violates the First Amendment when it is applied against someone who refuses to create custom wedding cakes for same-sex wedding celebrations because doing so would violate the baker’s sincerely held religious beliefs. 

In the article, Amar and Brownstein focus on only the free speech component, considering the following factors: a current absence of comprehensive doctrine on compelled speech, a complex doctrine of suppression of speech, and what a nuanced controlled speech doctrine might look like. 

Read the full post on justia.com.