This Federal Judge Just Loves Nerding Out

Judge Owens agrees this is the law, but that doesn't mean he thinks it should be the law.

onJuly 8, 2016 at 2:31 PMJuly 8, 2016 at 1:34 PM

Judge John Owens

Judge John Owens of the Ninth Circuit is quickly moving up Above the Law’s informal ranking of most beloved judges. When Judge Owens last caught our attention, he was slipping a reference to Game of Thrones into a concurrence. Welp, he’s back in the concurrence game, this time dropping sci-fi references.

In Lone Star Security & Video v. City of Los Angeles, plaintiffs challenged Los Angeles’s ordinances regulating mobile billboards. Part of the city’s justification of the rules was its aesthetic interest in limiting mobile billboards, vehicles whose primary purpose was displaying an advertising message rather than transporting passengers or cargo.

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The Ninth Circuit upheld the city ordinances as content-neutral and reasonable regulations of the time, place, and manner of speech.

Judge Owens agrees this is the law, as interpreted by the controlling Supreme Court case, but that doesn’t mean he thinks it should be the law. Indeed, he uses a Monopoly analogy and a reference to The Twilight Zone to urge the Supreme Court to reconsider its holdings:

This case is about ugly signs on vehicles, and no doubt I would not want these vehicles and their signs parked in front of my house. But under the ordinances at issue, a car with equally ugly decals — including a decal of a vehicle with an ugly sign — would not “go to jail,” but instead treat my curb like the upper left corner of a Monopoly board.

If “aesthetics” are to play a part in speech restriction, then such aesthetics should apply equally, decal or sign. Yet under Taxpayers for Vincent, the Court rejected the very point that I now make. See 466 U.S. 810–12 (rejecting the Ninth Circuit’s holding that “a prohibition against the use of unattractive signs cannot be justified on esthetic grounds if it fails to apply to all equally unattractive signs wherever they might be located”). I think our court was right then, and the Supreme Court should reconsider this portion of Taxpayers for Vincent. As it currently stands, politicians can use Taxpayers for Vincent and its beholderish “aesthetics” to covertly ensure homogeneous thinking and political discourse. That is a dimension we should avoid. See The Twilight Zone: Eye of the Beholder (CBS television broadcast Nov. 11, 1960).

What a fun and effective way to make his point. I wonder if for his next concurrence Judge Owens can sneak in a shout-out to Pokémon Go.