The 11th Circuit in Florida has just issued its en banc ruling in the infamous “Docs v. Glocks” case. This is something like the third or fourth decision in this case, which addresses the question of whether and to what extent doctors can ask their patients about firearms in the home.
As I’ve written about before, my interest in the case is what it tells us about state regulation of professional speech. Such regulation is an open area, and obviously important to lawyers and the legal profession. After all, most of what we do professionally consists of “speech.”
Today’s decision – which reverses the prior panel, thus striking down the speech-offending portions of the law – spends a fair bit of time parsing the meager state of occupational speech regulation law (much of which consists of Justice Byron White’s concurrence in the 1985 case of Lowe v. S.E.C.). In so doing, it affirmatively rejects the appropriateness of “rational basis” review of occupational speech-limiting regulation, while leaving the ultimate question (which is it, intermediate or strict scrutiny?) hanging:
Because these provisions fail to satisfy heightened scrutiny under Sorrell, they obviously would not withstand strict scrutiny. We therefore need not decide whether strict scrutiny should apply.
Darn it. Still, it’s good to see a decision solidly finding that professional speech is entitled to First Amendment protection – even if it can’t quite tell us how limited the state’s power to regulate might be.