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In response to the murder of a judge’s son, New Jersey enacted Daniel’s Law to advance its interest in protecting law enforcement officers and judges. The law allows covered officials and members of their families who live with them to send notices to businesses and people that require them not to publish the officials’ home addresses or unpublished telephone numbers, even when that information remains publicly available elsewhere, including in public records. The law allowed covered officers to assign their claims—which nearly 20,000 of them did, giving Atlas Data Privacy Corp. the right to send notices under Daniel’s Law and to sue anyone who failed to comply. Atlas brought dozens of lawsuits, and the defendants moved to dismiss them, arguing Daniel’s Law was an unconstitutional content-based restriction of speech that failed to meet the requirements of strict scrutiny.

The U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey correctly identified Daniel’s Law as a content-based restriction on speech. However, the court did not apply strict scrutiny. Instead, it characterized the law as a privacy law subject to a lesser degree of constitutional scrutiny and denied the motions to dismiss. The defendants appealed.

FIRE filed an amicus brief in support of the appellants in dozens of consolidated appeals. ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵAPP¹ÙÍø’s brief highlights the importance of applying the correct constitutional test and argued that the court erred when it failed to apply strict scrutiny to Daniel’s Law after identifying it as a content-based restriction on speech. It is imperative that courts keep the starch in the doctrines that protect our constitutional rights—it is only by applying strict scrutiny rigorously that courts protect our freedom of speech against erosion whenever sympathetic cases arise.