plainly legitimate sweep

In the predawn hours of June 21, 1990, petitioner R.A.V., then a juvenile, and several other teenagers assembled a crudely made cross by taping together broken chair legs and burned the cross inside the fenced yard of a black family that lived across the street from the house where R.A.V. was staying. Although this conduct could have been punished under several Minnesota statutes carrying significant penalties, the City of St. Paul chose to charge R.A.V. under the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance. The ordinance provides that whoever places on public or private property a symbol, object, appellation, characterization or graffiti, including but not limited to a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor. R.A.V. moved to dismiss the charge on the ground that the ordinance was substantially overbroad and impermissibly content-based and therefore facially invalid under the First Amendment, and the trial court granted the motion. The Minnesota Supreme Court reversed, construing the ordinance to reach only fighting words and concluding that it was not impermissibly content-based. This Court granted certiorari.

Edward Lawson was detained or arrested on approximately fifteen occasions by San Diego police officers between March 1975 and January 1977 while walking on the streets of the city. On each occasion, officers stopped Lawson and requested that he produce a driver's license or other identification. When he was unable to comply, the officers arrested him under California Penal Code section 647(e). Lawson was prosecuted twice under the statute and convicted once. The second charge was dismissed. Lawson filed a civil action in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California against various officers and officials, including Deputy Chief Commander H. A. Porazzo of the California Highway Patrol. The complaint sought a declaratory judgment that section 647(e) was unconstitutional, a mandatory injunction restraining its enforcement, and compensatory and punitive damages. The District Court held the statute overbroad, enjoined its enforcement, and denied damages on the ground that the officers had acted in good faith. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the District Court's determination that the statute was unconstitutional. It concluded that the statute violated the Fourth Amendment, contained a vague enforcement standard susceptible to arbitrary enforcement, and failed to give fair notice of the conduct prohibited. The Ninth Circuit also reversed the denial of a jury trial on the damages issue and remanded the case for trial. The officers appealed to the Supreme Court from the portion of the judgment declaring the statute unconstitutional and enjoining its enforcement. The Supreme Court noted probable jurisdiction. California Penal Code section 647(e) (West 1970) provides that every person who loiters or wanders upon the streets or from place to place without apparent reason or business is guilty of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. The statute further requires that such a person refuse to identify himself and to account for his presence when requested by any peace officer if the surrounding circumstances indicate to a reasonable man that the public safety demands such identification. California courts have construed the statute to require that a detained person provide credible and reliable identification. This identification must carry reasonable assurance that it is authentic and provide means for later contact with the person who has identified himself. The District Court made no specific findings concerning the circumstances of each stop, but the trial transcript contains descriptions given by both Lawson and the officers. One officer testified that he stopped Lawson on an otherwise vacant street late at night because the area was isolated and near a high-crime zone. Another testified that he detained Lawson while walking at a late hour in a business area where burglaries had occurred. Lawson stated that he had never been stopped by police for any reason apart from these detentions under the statute.

The Village of Schaumburg is a suburban community located 25 miles northwest of Chicago, Illinois. On March 12, 1974, the Village adopted an ordinance regulating the activities of peddlers and solicitors. Every charitable organization that solicits or intends to solicit contributions from persons in the village by door-to-door solicitation or the use of public streets and public ways must apply for a permit prior to such solicitation. The ordinance prohibits solicitation without a permit and imposes a fine of up to $500 for each offense. It further requires that permit applications contain satisfactory proof that at least seventy-five percent of the proceeds of such solicitations will be used directly for the charitable purpose of the organization. Salaries or commissions paid to solicitors and administrative expenses of the organization, including salaries, attorneys' fees, rents, telephone, advertising expenses, contributions to other organizations, and related overhead items, are excluded from the definition of charitable purposes. Citizens for a Better Environment is an Illinois not-for-profit corporation organized for the purpose of promoting the protection of the environment. It is registered with the Illinois Attorney General's Charitable Trust Division and has been afforded tax-exempt status by the United States Internal Revenue Service. The Village denied CBE a permit because it could not demonstrate that seventy-five percent of its receipts would be used for charitable purposes as defined. CBE then sued the Village in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. In its amended complaint, CBE alleged that it was organized to protect the Illinois environment. Its canvassers engage in door-to-door activity to distribute literature on environmental topics, answer questions, solicit contributions, and receive grievances. The Village's answer alleged that CBE is primarily devoted to raising funds for the benefit and salary of its employees. The Village also alleged that more than sixty percent of the funds collected by CBE have been spent for benefits of employees and not for any charitable purposes. CBE moved for summary judgment and filed affidavits describing its purposes and the activities of its canvassers. The affidavits stated that in 1975 the organization spent 23.3 percent of its income on fundraising and 21.5 percent on administration, with similar figures in 1976. The Village opposed the motion but filed no counteraffidavits. The District Court awarded summary judgment to CBE, declaring the seventy-five percent requirement void on its face and enjoining its enforcement. The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the judgment in 590 F. 2d 220 (1978). The Supreme Court granted certiorari in 441 U. S. 922 (1979) to review the Court of Appeals' determination.

In 1996 Congress enacted the Communications Decency Act as Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Immediately after the President signed the bill, twenty plaintiffs including the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against the Attorney General challenging the constitutionality of 47 U.S.C. §§ 223(a)(1)(B) and 223(d). A week later a second suit was filed by twenty-seven additional plaintiffs; the cases were consolidated and a three-judge district court was convened. The district court conducted an evidentiary hearing based on a detailed stipulation of 356 paragraphs plus live testimony and made 410 findings of fact. Those findings described the Internet as an international network of interconnected computers that had grown from roughly 300 host computers in 1981 to approximately 9,400,000 by the time of trial, with about 40 million users expected to reach 200 million by 1999. The findings detailed communication methods including e-mail, mail exploders, newsgroups, chat rooms, and the World Wide Web, noting that any person or organization with Internet access could publish information and that the content available was as diverse as human thought. The district court further found that sexually explicit material on the Internet included text, pictures, and chat extending from the modestly titillating to the hardest-core, that such material was widely available but users seldom encountered it accidentally because a series of affirmative steps was required to access specific content, and that almost all sexually explicit images were preceded by warnings. The court determined there was no effective way to determine the identity or age of a user accessing material through e-mail, mail exploders, newsgroups, or chat rooms and that credit-card or adult-password verification systems were not economically feasible for most noncommercial providers and would impose significant burdens including the exclusion of adults without credit cards. The district court entered a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the two challenged provisions. The Government appealed directly to the Supreme Court under the CDA's special review provisions, and the Court noted probable jurisdiction.