Whether this Court should overrule Hill v. Colorado

QUESTION PRESENTED In iil v. Colorado, 530 U.S. 703 (2000), this Court upheld a Colorado law that prevented sidewalk counselors from sharing a message on a profound moral issue with their fellow citizens in the public way outside an abortion facility. Even then, multiple members of the Court denounced Hill as “patently incompatible with the guarantees of the First Amendment,” contrary to “more than a half century of well-established First Amendment principles,” and explicable only by the Court’s abortion jurisprudence. Id. at 741-65 (Scalia, J., dissenting); id. at 765-68 (Kennedy, J., dissenting). Since then, this Court’s intervening First Amendment precedents have “all but interred” Hill, leaving it “an aberration.” City of Austin v. Reagan Nat'l Advert. of Austin, LLC, 596 U.S. 61, 92, 104 (2022) (Thomas, J., dissenting). And most recently, this Court revisited its abortion precedents while citing Hill as an example of how those cases had “distorted First Amendment doctrines.” Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., 597 U.S. 215, 287 & n.65 (2022). Dobbs should have made clear beyond cavil that Hill could no longer skew public debate on a divisive issue being returned to the people. Inexplicably, however, the City of Carbondale treated Dobbs as an invitation to enact a brand-new ordinance modeled on, and virtually identical to, the law upheld in Hill. The lower courts had no choice but to uphold that carboncopy measure. This Court has a better option. The question presented is: Whether this Court should overrule Hill v. Colorado.