Anti-Abortion Group Strikes Blow Against Property Rights

Anti-abortion activists sought and received an injunction last week against a 2008 city ordinance making it illegal to attach leaflets or other literature to unattended cars, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported. Councilman Bruce Kraus said he sponsored the ordinance in response to the significant amount of litter created, especially along East Carson Street, by businesses and others placing fliers under the windshield wipers of unattended cars – fliers that, unwanted by the cars’ owners, were simply cast to the ground.

The ordinance’s opponents have incorrectly framed the legal battle as a battle for First Amendment rights and have laid the blame for litter on, as the plaintiffs’ attorney Ed White said, “drunk college students in the bar district.” But rather than a question of First Amendment rights or an answer to a problem caused by “drunk college students,” the anti-leafleting ordinance passed in 2008 is a necessary defense of property and privacy rights.

While the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, it does not guarantee the right to use someone else’s unattended private property (in this case a car) as a vehicle for speech — be it of a political or commercial nature. Indeed, the act of leafleting cars is an act of trespass that co-opts a person’s property for the purpose of reaching that person with an unwanted communication.

Not only does the ordinance banning this type of leafleting protect Constitutionally guaranteed property rights, it also serves to protect the sanctity of public places as zones where private citizens may interact with each other free from unwanted interference. Having an unwanted flier attached to one’s car is only a minor imposition on a person’s time and property, but simply because such an imposition is a matter of seconds or minutes rather than hours does not mean that it should be tolerated.

Notably, the ordinance does not ban handing out leaflets in public to people who willingly take them. It in no way prevents business and political organizations from communicating with people in public but only requires that that communication be between two consenting parties.

Rather than restore violated free speech rights to an injured party, the abandonment of the anti-leafleting ordinance will cede a part of the public square to a disparate collection of aggressive interest groups whose leafleting of parked cars constitutes a clear trespass against the property rights of private citizens.