SCHENCK v. PRO-CHOICE NETWORK OF WESTERN NEW YORK

Legal Principle at Issue

Whether a court-ordered injunction restricting anti-abortion protests outside of medical and abortion clinics violated the demonstrators' First Amendment right to free speech.

Action

Affirmed and reversed (or vacated) in part and remanded. Petitioning party did not receive a favorable disposition.

Facts/Syllabus

Respondents, upstate New York abortion doctors and clinics and an organization dedicated to maintaining access to abortion services, filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York seeking to enjoin petitioners, other individuals, and three organizations from engaging in blockades and other illegal conduct at the clinics. Before the complaint was filed, the clinics were subjected to numerous large-scale blockades in which protesters marched, stood, knelt, sat, or lay in clinic parking lot driveways and doorways, blocking or hindering cars from entering the lots, and patients and clinic employees from entering the clinics. In addition, smaller groups of protesters consistently attempted to stop or disrupt clinic operations by, among other things, milling around clinic doorways and driveway entrances, trespassing onto clinic parking lots, crowding around cars, and surrounding, crowding, jostling, grabbing, pushing, shoving, and yelling and spitting at women entering the clinics and their escorts. On the sidewalks outside the clinics, protesters called "sidewalk counselors" used similar methods in attempting to dissuade women headed toward the clinics from having abortions. The local police were unable to respond effectively to the protests due, in part, to the fact that the defendants harassed them verbally and by mail. 

The district court issued a temporary restraining order, and later, after the protests and sidewalk counseling continued, a preliminary injunction with provisions that banned "demonstrating within fifteen feet . . . of . . . doorways or doorway entrances, parking lot entrances, driveways and driveway entrances of [clinic] facilities" (fixed buffer zones), or "within fifteen feet of any person or vehicle seeking access to or leaving such facilities" (floating buffer zones). Another provision allowed two sidewalk counselors inside the buffer zones, but required them to "cease and desist" their counseling if the counselee so requested. In its accompanying opinion, the district court, inter alia, rejected petitioners' assertion that the injunction violated their First Amendment right to free speech. 

The en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed.