The district court violated plaintiff’s First Amendment rights by entering an order barring plaintiff from posting on social media websites its views, news articles and publicly filed documents about a pending lawsuit over the right to use the words “comic con” to describe its Utah-based convention. The prior restraint on speech was not justified by any realistic threat that the publicity would prevent the court from selecting an unbiased jury. Despite the Internet’s broad reach, few members of the jury pool were likely to read posts about the dispute, and the subject matter was not highly inflammatory or otherwise likely to prejudice a jury in a manner that standard measures such as voir dire could not guard against.
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (per curiam); October 26, 2017; 2017 WL 4837764.