Advertisements are a form of free speech.
6 vs 3 Supreme Court
6 vs 3 Supreme Court
...that can be regulated:
"After passage of the billboard-regulating Highway Beautification Act of 1965, Vermont moved to ban billboards outright in 1968. All billboards were gone from Vermont by 1974. Vermont is one of four states to have prohibited by law all billboards from view of highway rights-of-way, except for signs on the contiguous property of the business location."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Vermont#Conservati...
And in the interest of further eludicating those those that are unfamiliar with the nuanced manner in which courts use the term "free speech," I would say:
"That can be regulated, just like all other forms of free speech."
Even protected categories of speech like political speech can be regulated assuming the government interest passes strict scrutiny.
I would imagine that if it was a free speech, then tobacco industry already would have this law thrown out.
Read the first two paragraphs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite... ; it also discusses commercial speech.
My question was, wouldn’t this ruling be a basis to challenge the outright Tobacco ad ban?
Before the ban there was still regulation, the ads had to be offset with other content, pro-health etc. Just like with political ads on public airwaves now.
In Canada, for example, the Tobacco ban was successfully challenged in court as violating Freedom of Speech as recently as 1991. Ultimately the ban remained in place because of another backdoor called “peace, order, and good government.”