Justices to Decide on Airport Leaflet Ban

The Supreme Court, on the first day of its fall term, agreed Monday to decide whether city officials can bar religious groups and others from distributing leaflets within Los Angeles International Airport.

The case poses the question of whether busy public airports are legally similar to streets and parks--and therefore open to everyone--or whether the corridors of the terminal can be restricted “exclusively to those activities that benefit the traveling public.”

Since 1983, the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners has tried, without success, to enforce such a restrictive policy.

Lower federal courts, acting on a suit by the group Jews for Jesus, struck down the policy as a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals noted in a ruling last year that Alan H. Snyder, a minister who was arrested at the airport for distributing leaflets, was “not inhibiting the free flow of pedestrian traffic.” The airport authority could limit solicitors to certain places within airport facilities, the appeals court concluded, but it could not bar them entirely.

Airport authorities throughout the nation have lost a series of court fights when trying to keep solicitors out of terminals, but the high court has never ruled on the issue.

Los Angeles International, the world’s third-busiest airport, served 34 million passengers in 1984, according to the city’s appeal.

In Los Angeles, Assistant City Atty. James R. Kapel contended that it is “entirely reasonable” for the airport board to try to limit activities there “to airport-related purposes” rather than permitting the facility to become “a Hyde Park,” a reference to the London park where speakers go to be heard, or at least to speak.

The general counsel for Jews for Jesus, Jay Alan Sekulow, said he is confident that the Supreme Court will rule against Los Angeles.

“Airports are public forums, not much different from public streets. You can’t have an absolute ban on freedom of speech there,” Sekulow said. The case (Board of Airport Commissioners vs. Jews for Jesus, 86-104) will be argued sometime during the spring, and a decision will be handed down by next July.

Monday also marked the court’s first session with William H. Rehnquist presiding as the chief justice and Antonin Scalia taking his place on the bench as an associate justice.

As the session began, the justices handed down a list of brief orders disposing of the hundreds of appeals that had piled up during the summer. Most were simply dismissed without comment.

The court took no action on pending appeals concerning abortion, desegregation and school prayer, but the justices agreed to settle several other pending controversies:

- Can members of religious groups or foreign nationalities--such as Jews or Arabs--sue under federal civil rights laws that cover racial discrimination? Within one week in March, two federal appeals courts gave seemingly opposite answers to that question. One dismissed a suit by members of a Silver Spring, Md., congregation who took action against four men who had spray-painted swastikas on their synagogue, concluding that only those of the “nonwhite race” may sue under federal civil rights laws (Shaare Tefila Congregation vs. Cobb, 85-2156).

But another court concluded that an Arab college professor from Pennsylvania, though he acknowledged that he is Caucasian, could sue under the same anti-discrimination law when he was denied tenure (St. Francis Colleges vs. Al-Khazraji, 85-2169). The justices decided to pair the cases and issue one ruling.

- Does the prevailing court standard for defining obscenity contain a contradiction between “community standards” and a more worldly judgment about whether a work has “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value?” In 1973, the high court tried to end confusion over what is obscene by setting a three-part test that mentions both local standards and the judgment about the work when “taken as a whole.”

Two Rockford, Ill., store clerks convicted of selling obscene magazines contend that the Illinois obscenity law is so broad that it reaches “materials that appeal to a normal interest in nudity or sex.” Attorneys for Illinois say it is “neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to read the First Amendment as requiring that the people of Maine or Mississippi accept public depiction of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas or New York City” (Pope vs. Illinois, 85-1973).

- Can a governor refuse to extradite a suspect for trial in another state? Some have, including former California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., who refused to send Indian activist Dennis Banks to South Dakota for trial. Since 1981, Puerto Rican officials have been seeking an Iowa man accused of deliberately hitting a pregnant woman with his car. But two Iowa governors, relying on a legal privilege that arose during the Civil War, have refused to extradite the man (Puerto Rico vs. Branstad, 85-2116).