Appellant was distributing religious pamphlets on a privately owned passway or sidewalk thirty feet removed from a public highway of the State of Alabama and remained on these private premises after an authorized order to get off. Martin v. Struthers, 319 U.S. 141, 147-48. From Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core, List of United States Supreme Court cases involving the First Amendment, List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 326, Link to Cyber Promotions opinion (.pdf download), https://infogalactic.com/w/index.php?title=Marsh_v._Alabama&oldid=231616, United States free exercise of religion case law, Jehovah's Witnesses litigation in the United States, United States Supreme Court cases of the Stone Court, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, About Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core, Defendant found guilty in Alabama Circuit Court; Alabama Court of Appeals affirmed; Alabama Supreme Court denied certiorari. Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled that a state trespassing statute could not be used to prevent the distribution of religious materials on a town's sidewalk, notwithstanding the fact that the sidewalk where the distribution was taking place was part of a privately owned company town.

While the power of this Court, as the interpreter of the Constitution to determine what use of real property by the owner makes that property subject, at will, to the reasonable practice of religious exercises by strangers, cannot be doubted, we find nothing in the principles of the First Amendment, adopted now into the Fourteenth, which justifies their application to the facts of this case.3.

There is no more reason for depriving these people of the liberties guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments than there is for curtailing these freedoms with respect to any other citizen.6. Kristine Bowman is a Professor of Law at Michigan State University. Cf. In Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, the Supreme Court distinguished a private shopping mall from the company town in Marsh and held that the mall had not been sufficiently dedicated to public use for First Amendment free speech rights to apply within it. In its community aspects it does not differ from other towns. Writing for a 5-3 majority, Justice Hugo L. Black noted that “[t]he more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.” The Court continued, “Whether a corporation or a municipality owns or possesses the town[,] the public in either case has an identical interest in the functioning of the community in such manner that the channels of communication remain free.” Accordingly, the Court reversed Marsh’s conviction, concluding that the state could not use a trespass law to punish Marsh for distributing religious literature on the sidewalk of a company town. In a 5-3 decision, the court ruled in favor of Marsh. Dec 6, 1945. Opinions.

The Alabama State Tenure Commission (commission) sustained the board's action, and Marsh appealed to the trial court. Gulf did not prohibit individuals from neighboring areas from entering Chickasaw, driving on its streets, and shopping in the business district. The Court noted that the residents of these non-Gulf neighborhoods were freely allowed to use the company-owned streets and sidewalks to access the town's businesses and facilities. Newton, Merlin Owen. Our question then narrows down to this: Can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town? Citations are also linked in the body of the Featured Case. Cyber Promotions sued on free speech grounds, and cited the Marsh case as authority for the proposition that, even though AOL's servers were private property, AOL had opened them to the public to a degree sufficient that constitutional free speech protections could be applied. See County Commissioners v. Chandler, 96 U.S. 205, 208; Donovan v. Pennsylvania Co., supra, 199 U.S. at 294; Covington Drawbridge Co. v. Shepherd, 21 How. Under our decision in Lovell v. Griffin, 303 U.S. 444 and others which have followed that case,1 neither a State nor a municipality can completely bar the distribution of literature containing religious or political ideas on its streets, sidewalks and public places or make the right to distribute dependent on a flat license tax or permit to be issued by an official who could deny it at will.

These decisions accorded the purveyors of ideas, religious or otherwise, "a preferred position," Murdock v. Pennsylvania, supra at 115, even to the extent of relieving them from an unhampering and non-discriminatory duty of bearing their share of the cost of maintaining the peace and the other amenities of a civilized society.

The State attempted to analogize the town's rights to the rights of homeowners to regulate the conduct of guests in their home. Alabama has a statute generally applicable to all privately owned premises. Local determinations of such technical matters govern controversies affecting property. Appellant contended that to construe the state statute as applicable to her activities would abridge her right to freedom of press and religion contrary to the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Schneider v. State, 308 U.S. 147, 161.

This page was last modified on 13 March 2015, at 00:15. Leagle.com reserves the right to edit or remove comments but is under no obligation to do so, or to explain individual moderation decisions. We have also held that an ordinance completely prohibiting the dissemination of ideas on the city streets cannot be justified on the ground that the municipality holds legal title to them. The town of Chickasaw, Alabama was owned by the Gulf Shipbuilding Company (the Company), a private corporation. Syllabus ; View Case ; Petitioner Grace Marsh .

Chicago-Kent Law Review 55 (1979): 285-302. And so I agree with the opinion of the Court, except that portion of it which relies on arguments drawn from the restrictions which the Commerce Clause imposes on State regulation of commerce. Reed wrote, “The rights of the owner, which the Constitution protects as well as the right of free speech, are not outweighed by the interests of the trespasser, even though he trespasses in behalf of religion or free speech.”.

This article was originally published in 2009. Technology & Marketing Law Blog, March 27, 2018.

Just as all other citizens they must make decisions which affect the welfare of community and nation. The case is reversed and the cause remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion. . The “company town” is largely a thing of the past, but in the early 1920s much of the U.S. coal mining population lived in company-owned homes, as did many southern cotton mill workers.

It is Title 14, § 426, Alabama Code 1940 which so far as pertinent reads as follows: "Trespass after warning.

The Court noted, however, that the latter occupy a preferred position. And we have recognized that the preservation of a free society is so far dependent upon the right of each individual citizen to receive such literature as he himself might desire that a municipality could not, without jeopardizing that vital individual freedom, prohibit door to door distribution of literature. Alabama has a statute generally applicable to all privately owned premises.

The right to communicate ideas was expressed by us in Jamison v. Texas, 318 U.S. 413, 416, as follows: "But one who is rightfully on a street which the state has left open to the public carries with him there as elsewhere the Constitutional right to express his views in an orderly fashion.". Justice Frankfurter concurred in the Court's opinion with one exception. In Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), the Supreme Court held that a person distributing religious literature on the sidewalk of a “company town” was protected by the First Amendment rights of freedom of the press and religion and could not be arrested for trespass.
A deputy of the Mobile County Sheriff, paid by the company, serves as the town's policeman. Marsh v. Alabama.

The town of Chickasaw, Alabama was a company town near Mobile, Alabama which was owned and operated by the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation ("Gulf"). It was recognized in the opinion that the freedom of solicitation was the result of a regulatory statute and was not a Constitutional right. 328-329; cf. As the rule now announced permits this intrusion, without possibility of protection of the property by law, and apparently is equally applicable to the freedom of speech and the press, it seems appropriate to express a dissent to this, to us, novel Constitutional doctrine. When we balance the Constitutional rights of owners of property against those of the people to enjoy freedom of press and religion, as we must here, we remain mindful of the fact that the latter occupy a preferred position.7 As we have stated before, the right to exercise the liberties safeguarded by the First Amendment "lies at the foundation of free government by free men" and we must in all cases "weigh the circumstances and .. .

“The Constitution and Private Government: Toward the Recognition of Constitutional Rights in Private Residential Communities Fifty Years After Marsh v. Had the title to Chickasaw belonged not to a private but to a municipal corporation and had appellant been arrested for violating a municipal ordinance rather than a ruling by those appointed by the corporation to manage a company town it would have been clear that appellant's conviction must be reversed. We do not think it makes any significant constitutional difference as to the relationship between the rights of the owner and those of the public that here the State, instead of permitting the corporation to operate a highway, permitted it to use its property as a town, operate a "business block" in the town and a street and sidewalk on that business block. When Grace Marsh, a Jehovah’s Witness, began passing out religious literature on the sidewalk in front of the post office, however, she was told she would not be given a permit to distribute the literature and was asked to leave. South Carolina Highway Dept. As we have heretofore stated, the town of Chickasaw does not function differently from any other town. Alabama, also, decided that appellant violated by her activities the above-quoted state statute.

Appellant, as we have said, was free to engage in such practices on the public highways, without becoming a trespasser on the company's property. Appellant was warned that she could not distribute the literature without a permit and told that no permit would be issued to her. In the trial court and throughout the appellate process, Marsh argued that her individual constitutional rights of freedom of press and freedom of religion should not be trumped by the private property owner’s right to exclude.

In our view the circumstance that the property rights to the premises where the deprivation of liberty, here involved, took place, were held by others than the public, is not sufficient to justify the State's permitting a corporation to govern a community of citizens so as to restrict their fundamental liberties and the enforcement of such restraint by the application of a state statute. Unless they fall under the prohibition of some legal rule, however, they are a matter for adjustment between owner and licensee, or by appropriate legislation. . It does not seem to me to further Constitutional analysis to seek help for the solution of the delicate problems arising under the First Amendment from the very different order of problems which the Commerce Clause presents.
Jan 7, 1945. Two decades later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 limited private property owners’ ability to refuse entry or service to individuals on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin in places of public accommodation. Constitutional protections of free speech under First and Fourteenth Amendments still applicable within the confines of a town owned by a private entity. Kaplan, Frederick.