RAV v. City of St. Paul
Citation and Court
505 U.S. 377 (1992) — Supreme Court of the United States
Facts
A juvenile identified as R.A.V. burned a cross inside the fenced yard of a Black family in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was charged under a St. Paul bias-motivated crime ordinance that prohibited placing symbols — including burning crosses or Nazi swastikas — that one knows or has reason to know arouses anger, alarm, or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender.
Issue
Whether St. Paul’s bias-motivated crime ordinance, as applied to cross burning, violates the First Amendment.
Holding
Yes. The ordinance is facially unconstitutional because it regulates speech based on the viewpoint or content of the message it expresses, even within the category of unprotected “fighting words.” The government may not carve out certain subsets of an unprotected speech category for special prohibition based on ideological content.
Rule / Doctrine
Content and viewpoint discrimination within unprotected speech categories: even speech that falls within an unprotected category (such as fighting words) may not be selectively prohibited based on its content or viewpoint. A law banning only bias-motivated fighting words — but not other fighting words — discriminates based on the content of the message and is therefore unconstitutional.
Significance
R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul is the key case establishing that the government cannot use the unprotected nature of a speech category as a license to regulate it on the basis of viewpoint or message content. It generates significant tension with the separately upheld hate crime sentence-enhancement statutes in Wisconsin v. Mitchell (1993), illustrating the distinction between punishing speech (unconstitutional) and punishing conduct with a discriminatory motive (constitutional).