Summary
The 1982 US Supreme Court case, “the most regularly cited precedent on the issue” in Kenney-Shawa’s brief, holding that a nonviolent, politically motivated boycott is protected by the First Amendment (line 203).
Details
- Origin as the brief gives it: in 1966 the local NAACP chapter in Claiborne County, Mississippi, coordinated a boycott of white-owned businesses demanding racial justice; the affected owners sued the NAACP and the organizers for economic damages, and the case made its way through the lower courts to the Supreme Court (lines 203-205).
- Holding as the brief gives it: a state’s right to regulate economic activity “could not justify a complete prohibition against a nonviolent, politically motivated boycott”; the boycott was protected because composed of speech, assembly and petition; Justice John Stevens emphasized that “the purpose of petitioners’ campaign was not to destroy legitimate competition” but to “vindicate rights of equality and of freedom”, and that “petitioners sought to change a social order that had consistently treated them as second-class citizens” (lines 203-207).
- The brief’s application: boycotting Israeli goods produced in the West Bank “falls squarely within US citizens’ constitutionally protected rights” by the same logic, which district courts in Arizona, Georgia, Kansas and Texas confirmed (line 207).
- The brief’s conflict: the Eighth Circuit’s 2022 Arkansas ruling reinterpreted the precedent to protect only the expressive actions accompanying a boycott, not the act itself — which critics say misrepresents Claiborne, where the court did not differentiate accompanying speech from the act of boycott (lines 213-215).
Related pages
Challenging Anti-Boycott Legislation in the US, NAACP, Eighth Circuit, Arkansas Times, Anti-boycott legislation, Freedom of Expression