COHEN v. CALIFORNIA

Did the Secret Service unconstitutionally discriminate against protestors when asking one group to leave while allowing another to stay?

Whether protests can be held liable in court for inflicting intentional emotional distress when picketing a funeral with hyperbolic signs, some of which are directed at the deceased.

Whether the First Amendment allows public schools to prohibit students from displaying messages that allegedly promote the use of illegal substances at so-called school-sponsored events. Whether the Ninth Circuit departed from established principles of qualified immunity in holding that a public high school principal was liable in a damages lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. _ 1983 when, pursuant to the school districts policy against displaying messages promoting illegal substances, she disciplined a student for displaying a large banner with a slang marijuana reference at a school-sponsored, faculty-supervised event.

Whether a statute banning cross-burning with the intent to intimidate violates the First Amendment.

Whether a federal law requiring cable operators to "fully scramble" indecent and sexually explicit programming on adult stations violate the First Amendment.

Whether the provisions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that prohibit the transmission of indecent and patently offensive materials to minors over the Internet violate the First Amendment.

Whether the government may constitutionally (1) permit cable operators to refuse to carry indecent material on leased local access channels, (2) require cable operators that choose to carry indecent local access programming to place such programming on a separate channel and to block the channel until the subscriber requests unblocking, and (3) permit cable operators to refuse to carry indecent programming on local public, educational, and governmental channels.

Whether the court-mandated inclusion of the Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc. (GLIB) in Boston’s 1993 St. Patrick’s Day parade violated the First Amendment rights of the private group, the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, that the city of Boston authorized to organize the parade.

Whether an ordinance punishing such action that “arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender” violates the First Amendment.

Whether Appellees' prosecution for burning a United States flag in violation of the Flag Protection Act of 1989 is consistent with the First Amendment.

Whether a California law banning indecent as well as obscene interstate commercial telephone messages violated the First Amendment's free speech guarantee

Whether Gregory Lee Johnson's conviction under a Texas law for publicly burning an American flag in protest violates the First Amendment.

Whether a law outlawing signs within 500 feet of a foreign embassy tending to bring the foreign government into "public odium " or "public disrepute" and gatherings that refuse to disperse violates the First Amendment.

Whether the denial of a permit to protestors requesting to camp out in Washington D.C. parks, according to Park Service regulations, violated the protestors' First Amendment rights.

Whether a state statute that bars picketing of residences or dwellings, but exempts from its prohibition "the peaceful picketing of a place of employment involved in a labor dispute" violates the First Amendment because it is not content-neutral.

Whether a public employee forfeits his or her 1st Amendment protection against governmental abridgment of freedom of speech when he arranges to communicate privately with his employer rather than to express his views publicly.

Whether a broadcast of patently offensive words dealing with sex and excretion may be regulated because of its content.

Whether the Bar, acting with state authorization, constitutionally may discipline a lawyer for soliciting clients in person, for pecuniary gain, under circumstances likely to pose dangers that the State has a right to prevent.

Whether a Florida ordinance making it a public nuisance and a punishable offense for a drive-in movie theater to exhibit films containing nudity, when the screen is visible from a public street or place, violates the First Amendment guarantee to freedom of speech and expression.

Whether a city-owned placard on the side of a city bus, which has been opened for commericial advertising use but not political advertising, is a public forum.

Whether a conviction for affixing a peace symbol to a United States flag under a state statute prohibiting flag desecration violates the First Amendment.

Whether a state may punish speech that is not part of “narrowly limited classes of speech” outside First Amendment protection (such as incitement, obscenity, or fighting words), and whether advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future period qualifies as incitement.

Does a Chicago city ordinance which bans non-union picketing within 150 feet of a school building violate both the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?

Whether the city’s “anti-picketing” ordinance and “anti-noise” ordinance violated the First Amendment.

Whether a Georgia criminal statute prohibiting “opprobrious words or abusive language, tending to cause a breach of the peace” violates the First Amendment.

Whether a statute under which an individual can require a mailer to stop all future mailings that the person "believes to be erotically arousing or sexually provocative" violates the mailer's rights of free speech and due process.

Whether a New York statute that made it illegal to "publicly [to] mutilate, deface, defile, or defy, trample upon, or cast contempt upon either by words or act [any flag of the United States]" violates the First Amendment.

Whether a Birmingham city ordinance, which gave public officials the unbridled authority to issue or withhold parade permits without reference to the legitimate regulation of public streets and sidewalks, unconstitutionally abridged the petitioner’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

Whether the wearing of armbands by public school students as a form of symbolic speech is protected by the First Amendment.

Whether burning a draft card as part of an anti-war protest is symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment.

Must a protester, when faced with an injunction enforcing a facially unconstitutional ordinance, engage in an orderly judicial review of that injunction before disobeying it?

Whether 1st and 14th Amendment freedoms give students the right to engage in peaceful protests on jailhouse grounds.

Whether a breach of the peace conviction arising out of a peaceful sit-in in a segregated library infringed upon the petitioners First Amendment free speech, assembly, and petition rights.

Do statutory "disturbance of the peace" and "obstruction of public passageways" convictions, for a peaceable demonstration that contains speech that may potentially incite violence, infringe on a demonstrator's First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly?

Do statutory "disturbance of the peace" and "obstruction of public passageways" convictions, for a peaceable demonstration that contains speech that may potentially incite violence, infringe on a demonstrator's First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly?

Whether the First Amendment was violated when civil rights protestors, marching in front of the state house, were arrested after refusing to disperse when a crowd gathered.

Whether a "Green River Ordiance" which bans the soliciting of individuals on their property without their consent violates the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment freedom of speech rights of magazine solicitors.

Whether the police can charge a speaker with disorderly conduct for continuing to speak to a restless and hostile crowd.

Whether a city ordinance which prescribes no appropriate standard for administrative action and gives an administrative official discretionary power to control in advance the right of citizens to speak on religious matters on the city streets is invalid under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Does the First Amendment protect people’s right to say things that make other people so angry that it may lead them to cause unrest?

Whether a municipal ban on the use of any sound system emitting "loud and raucous" noises on public streets violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Does the New Hampshire statute violate Chaplinsky's First and Fourteenth Amendment rights?