United States First Circuit

In an action challenging a statute creating a fixed buffer zone around reproductive health care facilities, district court judgment rejecting the facial challenge and refuseing to enjoin enforcement of the new law is affirmed where: 1) there is nothing in the text or the legislative history of the statute that deprives that statute of content-neutral status, and thus an intermediate scrutiny analysis applies; 2) the statute is a valid time-place-manner regulation that advances a significant governmental interest without burdening substantially more speech than necessary and leaves open adequate alternative channels of communication; 3) plaintiffs' overbreadth argument is without merit as the increased degree of the expansion of the buffer zone in the statute is reasonable, and thus the expansion is not a matter of constitutional significance; and 4) plaintiffs' vagueness argument fails as plaintiffs want to engage in the anti-abortion protests that are proscribed in the attorney general's challenged guidance letter, and a party to whose conduct a statute clearly applies may not successfully challenge it for vagueness.

Appellate Information

• Decided 07/08/2009
• Published 07/08/2009

Judges

• SELYA, Circuit Judge., Before HOWARD, SELYA and HANSEN, Circuit Judges.

Court

• United States First Circuit

Counsel

• For Appellant:
  
• Michael J. DePrimo, with whom Philip D. Moran, Philip D. Moran P.C., Benjamin W. Bull, and Alliance Defense Fund were on brief, for appellants., Dwight G. Duncan and Colbe Mazzarella on brief for Marlynda Augelli, Susanna Brennan, Cynthia Brown, Magdalena Castro, Alveda King, Anita Manninen, Esther Ripplinger, and Molly White, amici curiae., Robert E. McDonnell, Laura K. Langley, Josephine Deang, and Bingham McCutchen LLP on brief for American Civil Liberties Union of Mass., amicus curiae.


• For Appellees:
  
• Kenneth W. Salinger, Assistant Attorney General, with whom Martha Coakley, Attorney General, and Anna-Marie Tabor, Assistant Attorney General, were on brief, for appellee.