Kindt v. Santa Monica Rent Control Board’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

16 federal appellate · 5 district · 2 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 40 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[Kindt] argues that because Item 13 matters occur at the end of the meeting, he is ‘deprived of speech’ because he has a smaller audience by the time he is allowed to speak and because he is not allowed more than three minutes to respond to longer presentations by speakers who addressed the Board under Item 4. Those facts do not establish that Kindt’s First Amendment rights were violated. The Board regulations restricting public commentary to three minutes per item at the end of each meeting are the kind of reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions that preserve a board’s legitimate interest in conducting efficient, orderly meetings.... No invidious regulation of Kindt’s speech was implicated and content was not a factor — e.g., the fact that the Board’s views on the Cambodian regime might or might not be different from Kindt’s was not the point at all. Whether he wanted to speak in favor of those views or against them, his chit had to be heard under Item IS, which was the time set aside for public comment on all but such special matters as public hearings (Item 7). In other words, if the type of tangential resolution in issue here was meant to be covered by Rule 1024, the vice is not that the Board failed to hear public comment during the part of the agenda given over to ‘announcements, commendations, award of service pins, introduction of special guests,’ Item 4, or the ‘salute to the flag,’ Item 1. The vice is that the Board passed resolutions before it heard from th”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Galena ex rel. Erie County v. Leone

2. “A City Council meeting is still just that, a governmental process with a governmental purpose. The Council has an agenda to be addressed and dealt with. Public forum or not, the usual First Amendment antipathy to content-oriented control of speech cannot be imported into the council chambers intact. In the first place, in dealing with agenda items, the Council does not violate the First Amendment when it restricts public speakers to the subject at hand.... While a speaker may not be stopped from speaking because the moderator disagrees with the viewpoint he is expressing ... it certainly may stop him if his speech becomes irrelevant or repetitious. Similarly, the nature of a Council meeting means that a speaker can become disruptive in ways that would not meet the test of actual breach of the peace, or of “fighting words” likely to provoke immediate combat. A speaker may disrupt a Council meeting by speaking too long, by being unduly repetitious, or by extended discussion of irrelevancies. The meeting is disrupted because the Council is prevented from accomplishing its business in a reasonably efficient manner. Indeed, such conduct may interfere with the rights of other speakers.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. 522 F. Supp. 2d 983 - Lowery v. Jefferson County Board of Education

3. “[I]n White ..., we said that city council meetings, like those of the City of Nor-walk, “have been regarded as public forums, albeit limited ones.” Id. at 1425. However, we did not say that we agreed that those meetings were public fora.... We went on to say that disruptions could be prevented and that a speaker may dis rupt a board meeting “by speaking too long, by being unduly repetitious, or by extended discussion of irrelevancies.” Id. at 1426. With all of those restrictions, the type of forum described looks very much like a nonpublic one.... It seems to us that the highly structured nature of city council and city board meetings makes them fit more neatly into nonpublic forum niche. But, as we intimated in City of Norwalk , the important thing is not whether we call the meetings highly regulated limited public fora or nonpublic fora. The fact remains that limitation on speech at those meetings must be reasonable and viewpoint neutral, but that is all they need to be.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. 2 F. Supp. 2d 1362 - Scroggins v. City of Topeka, Kan.