Whether the Florida Department of Corrections' blanket ban of Prison Legal News violates Petitioner's First Amendment right to free speech and a free press

QUESTION PRESENTED Petitioner produces an award-winning monthly publication, Prison Legal News, featuring content directed to the specialized interests of inmates, including unlawful prison practices and litigation clarifying inmates’ civil rights. Despite allowing the magazine into its facilities for nearly two decades without any resulting security threats, the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) has banned every issue of Prison Legal News since 2009, ostensibly based on security concerns with the publication’s advertising content. The FDOC’s censorship is a national outlier—neither the federal Bureau of Prisons nor any other state or county prison system bans Prison Legal News based on its advertisements. And the FDOC has not pointed to concrete evidence of security problems either in the prison systems that allow Prison Legal News or even in Florida during the many years the publication was not censored. Nor has FDOC pointed to any unique characteristic that would explain why no other prison system shares its concerns. In conflict with this Court’s longstanding precedents and decisions from other circuits, the decision below upheld Florida’s blanket ban on Prison Legal News by blindly deferring to the FDOC’s unsubstantiated security concerns and granting virtually no weight to the First Amendment rights of petitioner, inmates or advertisers. The question presented is: Whether the Florida Department of Corrections’ blanket ban of Prison Legal News violates Petitioner’s First Amendment right to free speech and a free press.