District Court Grants Preliminary Injunction In Case In Which Blogger Published Home Addresses of California Legislators

The Eastern District for California has granted in part and denied in part plaintiffs’ motion in Publius v. Boyer-Vine, in which the anonymous plaintiff blogger “Publius” brought a case under 42 U.S.C. sec. 1983 alleging that the state of California’s demand that his ISP remove the home addresses of state legislator gun owners from a blogpost in which he had listed them  violated the First Amendment,  the Commerce Clause, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. His ISP removed the entire post. The plaintiff noted that he had obtained the information from a state-maintained database. 

The state argued that the take-down request that the ISP received from it (prodded by the legislators who had received threats based on the publication of their home addresses), resulted from the legislators’ activities as private citizens, not as legislators. The court declined to accept this argument.  “The Office informed WordPress and Hoskins that if they did not comply, the Office–on behalf of the legislators—would consider legal action, including attempting to recover the Office’s statutorily available fees and costs. The Office, a government entity, therefore provided legal services on behalf of 40 state legislators at their request and made that clear to WordPress and Hoskins when doing so. In the Court’s view, it is difficult to conceive how this could not constitute state action.”

The court examined the state’s argument that the legislators’ addresses were protected under the relevant California statute. While the information might ordinarily not be “a matter of public significance,” here this information was related to core political speech. In addition, because the California law limiting the publication of such information is content based, it requires strict scrutiny.

 The court granted the preliminary injunction with the proviso that the plaintiffs post a bond of $1.00.