Banning tobacco billboards: The case for municipal action
D. W. Garner
Southern Illinois University School of Law, Carbondale, IL 62901-6804, USA.
In 1994, Baltimore, Md, became the first city to generally prohibit
billboards from displaying alcohol and tobacco advertisements. The owner of
most of Baltimore's billboards, Penn Advertising, sued, but the federal
district court rejected the billboard company's complaint and ruled that
the First Amendment had not been violated and that the federal cigarette
labeling acts had not preempted the ability of Baltimore to regulate and
prohibit billboard cigarette advertising. In the fall of 1995, the federal
district court's judgment was unanimously affirmed by the Fourth Circuit
Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. This article analyzes the constitutional
and preemption issues and concludes that states and municipalities are on
firm legal ground when they restrict the location or placement of publicly
visible cigarette advertisements without attempting to regulate the
advertisement's content or message. States and municipalities command broad
authority to protect children and to shield the public from intrusive forms
of advertisement that inflict their messages on a captive audience. A
billboard ban thus offers local communities a legal avenue to help curb the
rising tide of juvenile smoking without raising taxes, creating bureaucracy
or angering smokers.
