FF, had some great one line bangers while also keeping a lot of good effort posts.
Hasn't posted since January and hasn't been online for 3 months.
Can someone explain to me how this isn't effectively an advisory ruling? Like the woman in question was never forced to design any website, let alone a graphic depiction of a gay couple. How on earth is this ripe?
The Court commonly engages in pre-enforcement review of laws that threaten constitutionally protected speech when there is a "credible threat of enforcement." SBA List v. Driehaus. Here, although she was not actually forced to design a website, it is enough that she wanted to do so, and that Colorado has a record of rigorously enforcing its laws against this kind of conduct, that there is a "credible threat" the law would be enforced against her. No party before the Court argued otherwise.
To flesh out the analogy: You want to hold an emo show in Colorado, a state that just passed a ban on emo. You could hold the show, be stopped, and then bring your lawsuit. But in this scenario, let's say Colorado had a history of rigorously enforcing its ban on pop punk, and the law lets anyone who knows a show is going to happen file a complaint, and the state refused to say they wouldn't enforce the law against you if you play the show. If all that's true, the Court has said it's okay for you to bring a lawsuit even before the law is enforced against you, because it's all but certain it would be if you actually played the show.
This doesn't work in all cases — if the law only bans "loud emo shows in residential neighborhoods," now it's a little more factual and they might only let you sue later, so that there's a more well-developed factual record (was the show actually loud? did it disrupt the neighborhood? etc). But here, where it's a pretty clear-cut constitutional argument, pre-enforcement review is generally okay.
A good and funny effort post.
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