Justice _____ delivered the opinion of the Court.
Jamie Ross was arrested and convicted in Federal District Court of violating sec. 3 of the National Registration and Identification Act (NRIA). During the course of a rally in East Lansing, Michigan, she criticized NRIA as violating personal rights of privacy and called upon others to follow her example by burning their NRI registration card. She then burned her card.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeal upheld her conviction for destroying her card, but struck down as unconstitutional under the First Amendment's ban on laws abridging free speech the provision of sec. 3 which criminalized encouraging others to destroy their cards.
This Court must decide two issues. First, did the provision of sec. 3 of NRIA under which Ms. Ross was convicted for what she said at the rally violate the First Amendment? This Court holds that it did for the following reasons:
1. Expressions of personal opinion on public issues, such as those Ms. Ross expressed, lie at the heart of our republican system of government. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said in his classic dissent in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919), "the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market" (p. 216 Materials).
2. Ever since Justice Harlan Stone's fourth footnote in the 1938 Carolene Products case, this Court has adjudged the constitutionality of laws restricting free speech by a standard of strict scrutiny, under which the government has the burden of proving that any governmental restriction on speech carries out a legitimate purpose of government and does so in the least restrictive way needed to achieve that end.
3. Ever since the 1930s, the Court has held that in the absence of a very strong showing that a restriction on speech is needed to protect the government against a serious, probable or imminent threat, it is not constitutional to res...