May the city of New Orleans subject local tour guides to hundreds of dollars in fines and five months in jail for engaging in unauthorized talking?

This is the question the Institute for Justice (IJ) seeks to answer in a federal lawsuit filed on December 13 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.  Four New Orleans tour guides are joining forces with IJ to strike down New Orleans’ tour guide licensing scheme as a violation of their fundamental constitutional rights:

According to First Amendment expert Matt Miller of the Institute for Justice, seen the above video:

The government cannot be in the business of deciding who may speak and who may not.  The Constitution protects your right to communicate for a living, whether you are a journalist, a musician or a tour guide.

New Orleans requires every tour guide to pass a history exam, undergo a drug test and pass an FBI criminal background check every two years merely for speaking.  People who give tours without a license face fines up to $300 per occurrence and five months in jail.

City officials are currently breaking up tours led by guides that don’t have the government’s permission.

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There’s a bad law on the books that is costing lives every single day.

Cancer patients from around the country have teamed up with a world-famous doctor, a non-profit and the Institute for Justice in a major federal lawsuit against the U.S. Attorney General to change that.

This week, we argued before the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.  (You can listen to the audio of the argument here.)

As our client Kumud Majumder wrote this Monday in the USA Today:

My 11-year-old son, Arya, was an angel who transformed my life. His death from leukemia last April took away not just my only child, it also took away my very heart and soul, and triggered the collapse of my 23-year marriage.

Arya’s tragedy happened in part because of a lack of bone marrow donors. Each year, as many as 3,000 people in the U.S. die waiting for a bone marrow donor match. A significantly higher number of people die from complications arising from partially matched donors. This is largely avoidable, and the shortage of donors is made worse by a federal law that I and other families of cancer patients are fighting in federal court.

There is chronic shortage of bone marrow donors in the United States.   The sad reality is that cancer patients die every day as a result.  More people would likely donate their bone marrow if we did one simple thing:  compensate them.

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The Institute for Justice has been vindicating the rights of entrepreneurs for the last twenty years.

Across the country, IJ has teamed up with casket makers, florists, hairbraiders, horse teeth-floaters, interior designers, sign-hangers, taxi-drivers, trash haulers, vintners and numerous other Americans to secure their basic right to earn an honest living.

This week, we are proud to announce a new, nationwide effort in our fight for economic liberty:  Our National Street Vending Initiative.

From coast to coast, we will team up with mobile food vending entrepreneurs whenever their rights come under attack, filing lawsuits and engaging in grassroots activism and media efforts.

In conjunction with the launch of this initiative, we have filed a major federal lawsuit against the city of El Paso Texas:

For thousands of years, vending has been a way for entrepreneurs to provide for themselves and their families.  In the United States, this ancient trade is more popular than ever.  By 2007, over 760,000 vending businesses were operating in the country.  And consumers love them, so they continue to grow.

The Economist magazine predicted that in 2011 food vendors would create “[t]he biggest shift in America’s culinary landscape” and that “some of the best food Americans eat may come from a food truck.”

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What do you get when you mix bureaucrats with a bunch of adorable puppies?

In Kim Houghton’s case, you get a major First Amendment lawsuit.

Kim Houghton decided after a successful, 20-year career in advertising that she wanted more.  She wanted to realize her American Dream and become an entrepreneur in a business focused on dogs.

She had the gumption to quit her job and make her dream come true:  Wag More Dogs is a high-end canine daycare located next to a popular dog park in Arlington, Virginia.  Kim commissioned an outdoor mural on her wall that has cartoon dogs, bones and paw prints as a way to give something back to the park she’d frequented for years, and build up some good will for her new business.

The mural was a big hit.  After all, who doesn’t like puppies?   Things were smooth for a few months.

And then Arlington bureaucrats got involved.

Officials blocked Kim’s building permit and told her that she could not open unless she painted over the mural or covered it with a blue tarp.

Her crime?

Painting a piece of art that—in the eyes of government officials—had too strong a “relationship” to her business.

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On Tuesday the Institute for Justice went to federal court to find out.

Two years ago IJ teamed up with three Philadelphia tour guides to file a major First Amendment lawsuit seeking to vindicate the freedom to speak in Philadelphia.

Ann Boulais, Mike Tait and Josh Silver sued because officials passed a law making it illegal for anyone like them to give a tour of much of the city’s downtown area without first passing a test and obtaining a government license—that is, getting the government’s permission to speak.

The case immediately sparked nationwide interest.  Robert McNamara, the First Amendment expert who filed the case, appeared on shows like All Things Considered and Marketplace to point out that the Constitution protects our right to communicate for a living, whether we are speaking out as bloggers, journalists, stand-up comedians or tour guides.

The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page feature:

Feeling tyrannized, Ms. [Ann] Boulais and two fellow guides summoned the constitution’s protections by suing the city in Philadelphia Federal court. The history test, they claimed, breached the Bill of Rights — a set of rules, as any good guide should know, that took effect while Congress sat here at 6th and Chestnut streets, on Dec. 15, 1791.

Of course, the guides are quick to point out that officials are violating fundamental American liberties in the very place those liberties were first enshrined in our Constitution.

In 2009, a year after the suit was filed, the city asked a federal judge to dismiss the case.  Their reason?  They had not allocated money in their 2009 budget to enforce the law right away.

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Abbot Justin Brown and his fellow monks are being threatened with crippling fines and even jail time.  Their crime?  Selling caskets.

Today, they are fighting back in a big way.

In 1889, a group of monks from Indiana fulfilled their dream of establishing a monastery in the Gulf South.  The monastic lifestyle they embody is simple and contemplative.  Their creation, the Saint Joseph Abbey, has had a powerful and positive impact in Louisiana.

For several centuries, monks have supported themselves financially by excelling at common trades such as farming and brewing beer.  The monks at Saint Joseph Abbey have been able to preserve and maintain their quiet lifestyle through farming and harvesting timber.

The monks make simple wooden caskets in which to bury themselves. In the early 1990s, Bishops began requesting the caskets, which led to inquiries from other interested people.  The demand continued to build:   People were eager to share in the monks’ view of the simplicity and unity of life and death through burial in a simple monastic casket.

As Abbot Justin Brown puts it:

The monks of Saint Joseph Abbey have been making caskets for over a hundred years.  People who ask for them want to share in that noble simplicity that our coffins express. We’re not a wealthy monastery and we need the income that Saint Joseph Woodworks could generate for the health care and the education of our own monks.

On November 1, 2007, the monks opened their Saint Joseph Woodworks.  But before they could sell even one casket, they were threatened with crippling fines, jail time and even a lawsuit.

Why?

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Wednesday’s federal court decision on Arizona’s immigration law is being rightly criticized for a number of reasons. But there are three silver linings to this situation, which may result in the rule of law prevailing in the end.

On July 28, Judge Susan Bolton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona issued a preliminary injunction—meaning she stopped from going into effect—most of the key provisions in Arizona’s new law. As I’ve written previously, this law should be held constitutional because it’s not an immigration law; it doesn’t determine who can become a citizen or who can be on American soil. Instead it’s a police-power law, where Arizona says that if you’re not permitted to be in this country, then you’re trespassing if you enter Arizona, and if you have a run-in with the cops for some other reason, then those cops can ask if you’re in this country illegally.

This is not an immigration law. It’s also not racist. It’s not racial profiling. And it’s not usurping the role of the federal government (which has abysmally failed here).

Instead, it’s an employment law and property law. That authority arises from Arizona’s police power to make laws for public safety, health, and societal welfare—which the Constitution reserves to the states through the Tenth Amendment.

But as bad as the federal court’s decision is, there are three silver linings to it that could see the rule of law prevail in the end, to the benefit of everyone—including foreigners who want to work here.

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Michael Graham in today’s Boston Herald:

Anyway, if enforcing immigration law is a bad thing for local cops to do, as Holder claims, why pick on Arizona? If he’s really upset that the same laws he has taken an oath to enforce might actually get (gulp!) enforced, why isn’t he suing Providence instead of Phoenix? They’ve been doing local immigration enforcement for years now.

As The Boston Globe-Democrat reported yesterday, “From Woonsocket to Westerly, the troopers patrolling the nation’s smallest state are reporting all illegal immigrants they encounter, even on routine stops such as speeding, to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Even liberal Providence, where politicians long opposed any local enforcement efforts, changed its policy in 2008 after the infamous Marco Riz case.

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From America’s Right:

Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe III, the independent filmmakers behind the series of videos which swept the nation in 2009 and exposed internal corruption and illegality within ACORN Housing Corporation, were sued today in federal court in Philadelphia by an ACORN employee featured in one of the pair’s films.

The plaintiff is Katherine Conway-Russell, a Philadelphia resident who has worked for ACORN since March 2008 as an office director.  It was Conway-Russell who met with Giles and O’Keefe, posing as a prostitute and pimp as they had in ACORN offices nationwide during other installments of the undercover video series, for a private interview in her office at ACORN’s facility in Philadelphia on July 24, 2009.  This is the first such suit filed against the filmmakers by an individual ACORN employee.

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