City of Los Angeles v. Alameda Books, Inc.

Summary

The Court reversed summary judgment invalidating Los Angeles's prohibition on combining multiple adult entertainment businesses in one building and remanded. Justice O'Connor's plurality, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas, concluded that the city's 1977 study reasonably supported its inference that concentrated adult operations generate crime, without requiring proof excluding every competing explanation. Justice Kennedy concurred only in the judgment, supplying the narrower rationale that the study and common experience justified allowing the ordinance to survive summary judgment, provided its rationale was to reduce secondary effects without substantially diminishing the quantity or accessibility of speech. Justice Scalia also wrote separately to maintain that communities may suppress the business of pandering sex without secondary-effects analysis. Justice Souter dissented, joined by Justices Stevens and Ginsburg throughout and Justice Breyer in Part II, arguing that the city had supplied no evidence connecting isolated combined bookstore-arcades to crime or showing that breaking them apart would alleviate it.