sharing the Second Circuit’s post-/urley “skepticism that the heavy machinery of the First Amendment is to be deployed in every case involving visual non-speech expression”
How later courts described this case
- sharing the Second Circuit’s post-/urley “skepticism that the heavy machinery of the First Amendment is to be deployed in every case involving visual non-speech expression”
- discussing Hurley, 515 U.S. at 569
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Case: 08-50960 Document: 00511024986 Page: 1 Date Filed: 02/10/2010
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT United States Court of Appeals
Fifth Circuit
FILED
February 10, 2010
No. 08-50960 Charles R. Fulbruge III
Clerk
MICHAEL KLEINMAN; SCOTT WADE; JOHN FURLY TRAVIS,
Plaintiffs-Appellants
v.
CITY OF SAN MARCOS
Defendant-Appellee
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Western District of Texas
Before JONES, Chief Judge, and PRADO and HAYNES, Circuit Judges.
EDITH H. JONES, Chief Judge:
This appeal concerns whether a junked-vehicle ordinance designed to
eliminate eyesores and promote public order, S AN M ARCOS, T EX., C ODE OF
O RDINANCES § 34.196(a), can be applied to a wrecked Oldsmobile 88 that has
been put to use as a cactus planter, colorfully painted, and adorned with the
words “make love not war.” Appellants contend that the car is an expressive
artwork and that interference with this display violates their rights under the
First Amendment and the Visual Artists Right Act (VARA). 17 U.S.C.
§ 166A(a)(3). The district court rejected both claims, then went further and
ordered the owner to comply with a removal order of the San Marcos municipal
Case: 08-50960 Document: 00511024986 Page: 2 Date Filed: 02/10/2010
No. 08-50960
court. We also reject Appellants’ constitutional and statutory claims but vacate
the district court’s attempt to enforce the municipal court order.*
I. BACKGROUND
Appellant Michael Kleinman operates Planet K stores throughout the San
Antonio and Austin areas. Planet K stores are funky establishments that sell
novelty items and gifts. Kleinman has a tradition of celebrating new store
openings with a “car bash,” a charity event at which the public pays for the
privilege of sledgehammering a car to “a smashed wreck.” The wrecks are then
filled with dirt, planted with vegetation, and painted. Placed outside each store,
the “planters” serve as unique advertising devices.
An Oldsmobile 88 car-planter was created upon the opening of a new
Planet K store in San Marcos, Texas. Kleinman arranged to have the smashed
car planted with a variety of native cacti and painted with scenes of life in San
Marcos. Positioned in front of the store, the distinctive planter is visible to
motorists traveling north on Interstate 35. Kleinman did not dictate the content
of the illustrations, but he requested that the phrase “make love not war” be
incorporated into the design. Two local artists, Scott Wade and John Furly
Travis, were commissioned to paint the wreck. At trial, Travis testified that he
had no particular message in mind when he painted the car, “just happiness.”
He intended his images to convey the idea that “you could take a junked vehicle,
junk canvas, and create something beautiful out of it.” Wade sought to
transform “a large gas-guzzling vehicle” into “something that’s more respectful
of the planet and something that nurtures life as opposed to destroys it.” Wade
explained that his intent was to describe American car culture and the link
between gasoline and the war in Iraq.
*
Judge Haynes concurs in the judgment only.
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On several occasions during and after the conversion of the smashed wreck
into a car-planter, the City of San Marcos ticketed Planet K and various Planet
K employees under an ordinance banning junked vehicles. The ordinance
declares junked vehicles to be a public nuisance and prohibits citizens from
placing or keeping junked vehicles on their property. S AN M ARCOS, T EX., C ODE
OF O RDINANCES §§ 34.194, 34.196(a). The ordinance defines a “junked vehicle”
as follows:
Junked vehicle means a vehicle that is self propelled, inoperable,
and:
(1) Does not have lawfully affixed to it both an unexpired license
plate and a valid motor vehicle safety inspection certificate;
(2) Is wrecked, dismantled, partially dismantled, or discarded; or
(3) Has remained inoperable for more than 45 consecutive days.
Id. § 34.191.
Kleinman contested the tickets and requested a hearing to determine
whether the car-planter falls within that definition. The San Marcos municipal
court found that it did and ordered the car-planter removed or brought into
compliance by concealment behind a fence or in an enclosure.1 Kleinman then
brought suit for injunctive relief in state court. The City removed the case to
federal district court. Wade and Travis joined the suit to assert their claims
under VARA.
Following a bench trial, the district court determined that the application
of the junked-car ordinance to the car-planter would not violate the First
Amendment and that Wade and Travis failed to state a statutory claim for relief.
The district court also ordered all three plaintiffs sua sponte to comply with the
1
A junked vehicle can be brought into compliance if the “vehicle or vehicle part is
completely enclosed within a building and is not visible from the street or other private or
public property” or if the “vehicle is completely covered by a heavy duty, contour-fitting cover
so that no part of the vehicle except the tires is exposed to public view and it is the only one
on the property,” SAN MARCOS , TEX ., CODE OF ORDINANCES § 34.197(a)(1), (a)(4).
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municipal court order and bring the car-planter into compliance with the City
Code within thirty days. This appeal ensued.
II. STANDARD OF REVIEW
This court reviews a district court’s factual findings after a bench trial for
clear error and its legal conclusions de novo. Water Craft Mgmt. LLC v. Mercury
Marine, 457 F.3d 484, 488 (5th Cir. 2006). Clear error exists:
if (1) the findings are without substantial evidence to support them,
(2) the court misapprehended the effect of the evidence, and
(3) although there is evidence, which if credible would be
substantial, the force and effect of the testimony, considered as a
whole, convinces the court that the findings are so against the
preponderance of credible testimony that they do not reflect or
represent the truth and right of the case.
Id. Reversal for clear error is warranted only if the court has a definite and firm
conviction that a mistake has been committed. Id.
III. DISCUSSION
A. First Amendment
Appellants’ principal contention is simple: “visual art” is fully protected
by the First Amendment. Consequently, neither the city ordinance nor the state
statute standing behind the ordinance 2 may impose a “content-based regulation”
prohibiting the car-planter’s public display. In the alternative, Appellants, while
acknowledging that the car-planter is a “junked vehicle,” assert that the
ordinance fails to satisfy intermediate scrutiny as applied to their creation.
2
Texas Transportation Code declares a junked vehicle visible from a public place to be
a public nuisance and its maintenance to be a misdemeanor punishable by a fine not to exceed
$200. TEX . TRANSP . CODE § 683.071, 072-073 (2007). In addition, municipalities may adopt
procedures to remove junked vehicles. Id. § 683.074. Any municipal procedures cannot apply
to a junked vehicle (1) that is completely enclosed in a building in a lawful manner and is not
visible from the street or other public or private property; or (2) that is lawfully stored in
connection with the business of a vehicle dealer or junkyard, or is an antique or special
interest vehicle, provided that the vehicle is orderly maintained, not a health hazard, and
screened from the public view. Id. § 683.077.
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That this cactus planter, a three-dimensional advertisement for a novelty
shop, could be considered a constitutionally-protected expression speaks more
to the law’s vagueness than to the capability or intention of the artists. In fact,
the City stipulated that “the vehicle/planter is an object which contains and
projects some level of artistic expression after it was painted by Plaintiffs Wade
and Travis and altered to allow it to grow plant-life.” 3 But this category is not
so unbounded. The Supreme Court, in the course of applying the First
Amendment to an expressive act (a Saint Patrick’s Day parade), stated
unanimously:
As some of these examples [of non-speech protected expression]
show, a narrow, succinctly articulable message is not a condition of
constitutional protection, which if confined to expressions conveying
a “particularized message,” would never reach the unquestionably
shielded painting of Jackson Pollock, music of Arnold Schönberg, or
Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll.
Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Group of Boston, 515 U.S.
557, 569, 115 S. Ct. 2338, 2345 (1995) (citation omitted). Hurley refers solely to
great works of art. Neither in Hurley nor in any later case has the Court
elaborated on the extent of First Amendment protection for visual non-speech
objects or artworks.
Seizing on Hurley’s statement, the Second Circuit declared, in a case
concerning New York City’s street vendor regulations, that artworks including
paintings, photographs, prints, and sculptures are “always” communicative and
therefore entitled to “full First Amendment protection.” Bery v. City of New
York, 97 F.3d 689, 696 (2d Cir. 1996). Despite this broad language, the Bery
court held only that the ordinance’s application to vendors of those works did not
stand up to intermediate scrutiny. Id. Further, the court reasoned that, because
3
The City, of course, rejects a characterization of the planter as protected by the First
Amendment.
5
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No. 08-50960
the crafts of the jeweler, the potter, and the silversmith are only sometimes
“expressive,” the constitutional protection afforded those categories of works
must be determined on a case-by-case basis. Id.
Subsequently, the Second Circuit grappled with Bery’s implication when
vendors of T-shirts and ballcaps decorated with “graffiti art” sought an
exemption from the same New York City ordinance. Mastrovincenzo v. City of
New York, 435 F.3d 78 (2d Cir. 2006). The court narrowed Bery’s broad dictum:
“To say that the First Amendment protects the sale or dissemination of all
objects ranging from ‘totem poles’ to television sets does not take us far in trying
to articulate or understand a jurisprudence of ordered liberty; indeed, it would
entirely drain the First Amendment of meaning.”4 Id. at 92 (citation omitted).
The court recast Bery’s distinction between fine art and decorative arts in terms
that enforcement officers and vendors in the “real world” can understand and
apply “without recourse to principles of aesthetics.” Id. at 95. Mastrovincenzo
ultimately decided that the “expressive” elements of the clothing merited some
First Amendment protection, but that the city ordinance was narrowly tailored
4
Bery has been criticized or limited by other lower court opinions as well. See, e.g.
White v. City of Sparks, 341 F. Supp. 2d 1129, 1139 (D. Nev. 2004)(declining to follow the Bery
holding because it would be out of step with
the First Amendment’s fundamental purpose — to protect expression.”);
Mastrovincenzo v. City of New York, 313 F. Supp. 2d 280, 294 n.11 (noting that
the difficulty with Bery is that it is “at once too broad and too narrow in their
scope of protection. Conceivably, not every item of painting, photograph, print
or sculpture that may be offered for sale on City sidewalks by any vendor is
necessarily so expressive as to categorically merit First Amendment protection,
but at the same time some objects outside those four categories may also be
sufficiently expressive.
State v. Chepilko, 965 A.2d 190, 202 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 2009)(agreeing with criticism
of Bery’s holding that any business activity that involves the taking and sale of photographs
automatically qualifies for First Amendment protection and concluding that such business
activity is entitled to First Amendment protection only if it serves predominantly expressive
purposes).
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and left ample alternative avenues of communication, thereby satisfying
intermediate scrutiny.
We share the Mastrovincenzo court’s skepticism that the heavy machinery
of the First Amendment is to be deployed in every case involving visual non-
speech expression. Protected expression takes many forms, but Hurley’s
reference to works of fine art did not sweep so broadly as to require a judicially
crafted hierarchy of artistic expression. By analyzing the artist-vendors’ rights
under intermediate scrutiny, the Bery court effectively conceded as much.
Fortunately, we need go no further than that in the instant case.
Irrespective of the intentions of its creators or Planet K’s owner, the car-planter
is a utilitarian device, an advertisement, and ultimately a “junked vehicle.”
These qualities objectively dominate any expressive component of its exterior
painting.5 Appellants concede that the car falls within the definition of the San
Marcos ordinance. Moreover, the Eighth Circuit, confronted before Hurley with
a wrecked auto that was displayed streetside to remind the public how the
owner’s son had been killed, had no difficulty finding that the auto’s removal
under a junked-vehicle ordinance survived intermediate scrutiny. Davis v.
Norman, 555 F.2d 189 (8th Cir. 1977). When the “expressive” component of an
object, considered objectively in light of its function and utility, is at best
secondary, the public display of the object is conduct subject to reasonable state
regulation. We therefore pretermit “recourse to principles of aesthetics.”
In an abundance of caution, however, because the City concedes that the
car-planter has some protected expressive content, we apply the intermediate
scrutiny test articulated by the Supreme Court in United States v. O’Brien,
391 U.S. 367, 88 S. Ct. 1673 (1973), which balances the individual’s right to
5
We need not reach the City’s contention that, if viewed as some form of protected
speech, the car-planter represents commercial speech entitled to a lesser level of constitutional
protection.
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speak with the government’s power to regulate. O’Brien rests on the principle
that when “speech” and “non-speech” elements are united in a course of conduct,
a valid governmental interest in regulating the nonspeech element can justify
incidental limitations on First Amendment freedoms. Id. at 376, 88 S. Ct. at
1678-79. Under O’Brien, a regulation is constitutional if it is within the
constitutional power of the government; it furthers an important or substantial
governmental interest; the government interest is unrelated to the suppression
of free expression; and the incidental restriction on alleged First Amendment
freedoms is no greater than is essential to the furtherance of that interest. Id.
at 376, 88 S. Ct. at 1679. The junked-vehicle ordinance passes muster under the
O’Brien test.
First, regulation of junked vehicles is within the City’s traditional
municipal police powers. Second, important governmental interests justify the
ordinance, the purpose of which is to protect the community’s health and safety
from the problems created by abandoned vehicles left in public view. A junked
vehicle is a public nuisance:
A junked vehicle that is located in a place where it is visible from a
public place or public right-of-way is detrimental to the safety and
welfare of the general public, tends to reduce the value of private
property, invites vandalism, creates fire hazards and constitutes an
attractive nuisance creating a hazard to the health and safety of
minors and is detrimental to the economic welfare of the city by
producing urban blight adverse to the maintenance and continuing
development of the City and is a public nuisance.
S AN M ARCOS, T EX., C ODE OF O RDINANCES § 34.196(a). Junked vehicles are an
attractive nuisance to children. Rodents, pests, and weeds thrive in and around
them. Testimony showed that the City pursued more than 1,300 junked vehicle
cases in the two years prior to trial. These facts, found by the district court, fully
support the City’s interests in regulating junked vehicles. The ordinance also
tends to reduce urban blight, vandalism, and the depressing effect of junked
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vehicles on property values. Appellants’ insistence that the car-planter has been
rendered safe is immaterial to the constitutionality of the ordinance. The City’s
right to regulate junked vehicles, not the individual status of each vehicle, is the
concern of First Amendment inquiry. See FTC v. Superior Court Trial Lawyers
Ass’n, 493 U.S. 411, 430, 110 S. Ct. 768, 779 (1990).
Third, the junked-vehicle ordinance is not intended to regulate “speech”
at all but is a content-neutral health and safety ordinance. Appellants argue
that the City’s enforcement of the ordinance is motivated by disagreement with
the content of the car-planter’s “message” and thus should be subject to the strict
scrutiny reserved for content-based speech regulations. The district court made
no finding of an impermissible motivation, nor is such a finding compelled by the
record.
Fourth, the ordinance is reasonably tailored to achieve the City’s
legitimate interests with only incidental restriction on protected expression. The
ordinance authorizes junked vehicles to remain on private property if enclosed
from public view. SAN MARCOS , TEX ., CODE OF ORDINANCES § 34.197(a)(1). Appellants
contend that the ordinance is not narrowly tailored because it permits an
exception for dealerships and junkyards. The underlying state statute, however,
prohibits the City from adopting any procedures as to vehicles “stored or parked
in a lawful manner on private property in connection with the business of a
licensed vehicle dealer or junkyard.” T EX. T RANSP. C ODE § 683.077. Thus, the
City has an overarching legal basis for exempting dealerships and junkyards
from its junked vehicle statute. Indeed, the exemption for businesses that deal
with junked vehicles reinforces rather than discredits the content-neutrality of
the junked vehicle ordinance. Both the City and the State sensibly distinguish
individual conduct from commercial conduct, which creates different hazards
and requires different regulations. In addition, the ordinance is limited to
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regulating the medium and location of the car-planter, and in so doing it reduces
the blight and attractive nuisance problems caused by vehicular wrecks.
Appellants also argue that the enclosure requirement leaves them without
any adequate alternative means of expression. See Ward v. Rock Against
Racism, 491 U.S. 781, 798-99, 109 S. Ct. 2746, 2753 (1989). But as the district
court noted, enclosing the car-planter does not cut off public access because it
leaves Planet K free to display the car-planter behind a fence, indoors, or in a
garage enclosure. Kleinman could still advertise and invite the public to view
the car-planter. He could, pursuant to local law, erect a sign or display a poster
of the car-planter visible to the public. Because the ordinance affords ample
alternative means for Appellants to express their messages, this court will not
second-guess the scope of the ordinance nor impose Appellants’ preferred display
mode on the City. Id. at 800, 109 S. Ct. at 2758.
B. VARA
Appellants Travis and Wade also raise claims under the VARA. The
VARA provides the author of a work of visual art with the right:
(A) to prevent any intentional distortion, mutilation, or other
modification of that work which would be prejudicial to his or her
honor or reputation, and any intentional distortion, mutilation, or
modification of that work is a violation of that right, and
(B) to prevent any destruction of a work of recognized stature, and
any intentional or grossly negligent destruction of that work is a
violation of that right.
17 U.S.C. § 106A(a)(3). The district court denied relief under VARA, finding that
the junked-vehicle ordinance does not require the destruction of a junked
vehicle, merely its screening from general public view.
The preliminary statutory issue, however, is whether the car-planter
qualifies as a “work of visual art” under the VARA. The statute excludes “any
merchandising item or advertising, promotional, descriptive, covering, packaging
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material or container” from protection. 17 U.S.C. § 101. The district court found
that the car-planters are closely associated with Planet K, are part of the store’s
corporate image and culture, and are a distinctive symbol of the Planet K
business. These findings, which are not clearly erroneous, indicate that the car-
planters are “promotional” material and thus outside of the VARA’s protection.
See Pollara v. Seymour, 344 F.3d 265, 270 (2d Cir. 2003). For this reason as well
as that of the district court, we affirm the conclusion that Appellants Travis and
Wade failed to state a claim for relief under VARA.
C. Order for Compliance
The district court ordered that “Plaintiffs shall comply with the Order of
the San Marcos Municipal Court” and “bring the car planter into compliance
with City Code.” Appellants assert this order was in error since the City never
requested any affirmative relief. Further, Wade and Travis were not parties to
the municipal court’s order and cannot be ordered to “comply.” We agree.
Although the City contends that the order is actually in Kleinman’s favor—by
giving him thirty days to comply before any City enforcement action—the
district court lacked jurisdiction to grant this relief. This portion of the district
court’s order must be vacated.
III. CONCLUSION
For the reasons articulated above, we affirm the judgment on the merits
but vacate the portion of the district court’s judgment that orders Appellants to
comply with the municipal court order.
AFFIRMED IN PART AND VACATED IN PART.
11