MR. JUSTICE STEWART delivered the opinion of the Court.
A group of labor union members who engaged in peaceful primary picketing within the confines of a privately owned shopping center were threatened by an agent of the owner with arrest for criminal trespass if they did not depart....
I
The petitioner, Scott Hudgens, is the owner of the North DeKalb Shopping Center, located in suburban Atlanta, Ga. The center consists of a single large building with an enclosed mall. Surrounding the building is a parking area which can accommodate 2,640 automobiles. The shopping center houses 60 retail stores leased to various businesses. One of the lessees is the Butler Shoe Co. Most of the stores, including Butler's, can be entered only from the interior mall.
In January 1971, warehouse employees of the Butler Shoe Co. went on strike to protest the company's failure to agree to demands made by their union in contract negotiations. The strikers decided to picket not only Butler's warehouse but its nine retail stores in the Atlanta area as well, including the store in the North DeKalb Shopping Center. On January 22, 1971, four of the striking warehouse employees entered the center's enclosed mall carrying placards which read: "Butler Shoe Warehouse on Strike, AFL-CIO, Local 315." The general manager of the shopping center informed the employees that they could not picket within the mall or on the parking lot and threatened them with arrest if they did not leave. The employees departed but returned a short time later and began picketing in an area of the mall immediately adjacent to the entrances of the Butler store. After the picketing had continued for approximately 30 minutes, the shopping center manager again informed the pickets that if they did not leave they would be arrested for trespassing. The pickets departed.
The union subsequently filed with the Board an unfair labor practice charge against Hudgens, alleging interference with rights protected by § 7 of the Act, 29 U.S.C. § 157. Relying on this Court's decision in Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza, the Board entered a cease-and-desist order against Hudgens, reasoning that because the warehouse employees enjoyed a First Amendment right to picket on the shopping center property, the owner's threat of arrest violated § 8(a)(1) of the Act....
II
In the present posture of the case the most basic question is whether the respective rights and liabilities of the parties are to be decided under the criteria of the National Labor Relations Act alone, under a First Amendment standard, or under some combination of the two. It is to that question, accordingly, that we now turn.
It is, of course, a commonplace that the constitutional guarantee of free speech is a guarantee only against abridgment by government, federal or state. Thus, while statutory or common law may in some situations extend protection or provide redress against a private corporation or person who seeks to abridge the free expression of others, no such protection or redress is provided by the Constitution itself.
This elementary proposition is little more than a truism. But even truisms are not always unexceptionably true, and an exception to this one was recognized almost 30 years ago in Marsh v. Alabama. In Marsh, a Jehovah's Witness who had distributed literature without a license on a sidewalk in Chickasaw, Ala., was convicted of criminal trespass. Chickasaw was a so-called company town, wholly owned by the Gulf Shipbuilding Corp....Concluding that Gulf's "property interests" should not be allowed to lead to a different result in Chickasaw, which did "not function differently from any other town," the Court invoked the First and Fourteenth Amendments to reverse the appellant's conviction.
It was the Marsh case that in 1968 provided the foundation for the Court's decision in Amalgamated Food Employees Union v. Logan Valley Plaza. That case involved peaceful picketing within a large shopping center near Altoona, Pa. One of the tenants of the shopping center was a retail store that employed a wholly nonunion staff. Members of a local union picketed the store, carrying signs proclaiming that it was nonunion and that its employees were not receiving union wages or other union benefits. The picketing took place on the shopping center's property in the immediate victinity of the store. A Pennsylvania court issued an injunction that required all picketing to be confined to public areas outside the shopping center, and the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the issuance of this injunction. This Court held that the doctrine of the Marsh case required reversal of that judgment....The Court's opinion reviewed the Marsh case in detail, emphasized the similarities between the business block in Chickasaw, Ala., and the Logan Valley shopping center, and unambiguously concluded: "The shopping center here is clearly the functional equivalent of the business district of Chickasaw involved in Marsh." Upon the basis of that conclusion, the Court held that the First and Fourteenth Amendments required reversal of the judgment of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court....
Four years later the Court had occasion to reconsider the Logan Valley doctrine in Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner. That case involved a shopping center covering some 50 acres in downtown Portland, Ore. On a November day in 1968 five young people entered the mall of the shopping center and distributed handbills protesting the then ongoing American military operations in Vietnam. Security guards told them to leave, and they did so, "to avoid arrest." They subsequently brought suit in a Federal District Court, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. The trial court ruled in their favor, holding that the distribution of handbills on the shopping center's property was protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the judgment, expressly relying on this Court's Marsh and Logan Valley decisions. This Court reversed the judgment of the Court of Appeals.
The Court in its Lloyd opinion did not say that it was overruling the Logan Valley decision. Indeed, a substantial portion of the Court's opinion in Lloyd was devoted to pointing out the differences between the two cases, noting particularly that, in contrast to the handbilling in Lloyd, the picketing in Logan Valley had been specifically directed to a store in the shopping center and the pickets had had no other reasonable opportunity to reach their intended audience. But the fact is that the reasoning of the Court's opinion in Lloyd cannot be squared with the reasoning of the Court's opinion in Logan Valley.
It matters not that some Members of the Court may continue to believe that the Logan Valley case was rightly decided. Our institutional duty is to follow until changed the law as it now is, not as some Members of the Court might wish it to be. And in the performance of that duty we make clear now, if it was not clear before, that the rationale of Logan Valley did not survive the Court's decision in the Lloyd case.
Not only did the Lloyd opinion incorporate lengthy excerpts from two of the dissenting opinions in Logan Valley; the ultimate holding in Lloyd amounted to a total rejection of the holding in Logan Valley: "The basic issue in this case is whether respondents, in the exercise of asserted First Amendment rights, may distribute handbills on Lloyd's private property contrary to its wishes and contrary to a policy enforced against all handbilling. In addressing this issue, it must be remembered that the First and Fourteenth Amendments safeguard the rights of free speech and assembly by limitations on state action, not on action by the owner of private property used nondiscriminatorily for private purposes only....Respondents contend... that the property of a large shopping center is 'open to the public,' serves the same purposes as a 'business district' of a municipality, and therefore has been dedicated to certain types of public use. The argument is that such a center has sidewalks, streets, and parking areas which are functionally similar to facilities customarily provided by municipalities. It is then asserted that all members of the public, whether invited as customers or not, have the same right of free speech as they would have on the similar public facilities in the streets of a city or town. The argument reaches too far. The Constitution by no means requires such an attenuated doctrine of dedication of private property to public use....We hold that there has been no such dedication of Lloyd's privately owned and operated shopping center to public use as to entitle respondents to exercise therein the asserted First Amendment rights...."
If a large self-contained shopping center is the functional equivalent of a municipality, as Logan Valley held, then the First and Fourteenth Amendments would not permit control of speech within such a center to depend upon the speech's content. For while a municipality may constitutionally impose reasonable time, place, and manner regulations on the use of its streets and sidewalks for First Amendment purposes, and may even forbid altogether such use of some of its facilities, what a municipality may not do under the First and Fourteenth Amendments is to discriminate in the regulation of expression on the basis of the content of that expression. It conversely follows, therefore, that if the respondents in the Lloyd case did not have a First Amendment right to enter this shopping center to distribute handbills concerning Vietnam, then the pickets in the present case did not have a First Amendment right to enter this shopping center for the purpose of advertising their strike against the Butler Shoe Co.
We conclude, in short, that under the present state of the law the constitutional guarantee of free expression has no part to play in a case such as this....
MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL, with whom MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN joins, dissenting.
I dissent from the overruling of Logan Valley....
Turning to the constitutional issue resolved by the Court, I cannot escape the feeling that Logan Valley has been laid to rest without ever having been accorded a proper burial. The Court today announces that "the ultimate holding in Lloyd amounted to a total rejection of the holding in Logan Valley." To be sure, some Members of the Court, myself included, believed that Logan Valley called for a different result in Lloyd and alluded in dissent to the possibility that "it is Logan Valley itself that the Court finds bothersome." But the fact remains that Logan Valley explicitly reserved the question later decided in Lloyd, and Lloyd carefully preserved the holding of Logan Valley. And upon reflection, I am of the view that the two decisions are reconcilable....
A
In Logan Valley the Court was faced with union picketing against a nonunion supermarket located in a large shopping center. Lloyd involved the distribution of antiwar handbills in a large shopping center, and while some of us viewed the case differently, the Court treated it as presenting the question left open in Logan Valley. But the Court did no more than decide that question. It preserved the holding of Logan Valley, as limited to cases in which (1) the picketing is directly related in its purpose to the use to which the shopping center property is put, and (2) "no other reasonable opportunities for the pickets to convey their message to their intended audience [are] available."
The Court today gives short shrift to the language in Lloyd preserving Logan Valley, and quotes extensively from language that admittedly differs in emphasis from much of the language of Logan Valley. But even the language quoted by the Court says no more than that the dedication of the Lloyd Center to public use was more limited than the dedication of the company town in Marsh v. Alabama, and that the pickets in Lloyd were not entitled to exercise "the asserted First Amendment rights" -- that is, the right to distribute antiwar handbills....
It is inescapable that after Lloyd, Logan Valley remained "good law," binding on the state and federal courts. Our institutional duty in this case, if we consider the constitutional question at all, is to examine whether Lloyd and Logan Valley can continue to stand side by side, and, if they cannot, to decide which one must fall. I continue to believe that the First Amendment principles underlying Logan Valley are sound, and were unduly limited in Lloyd. But accepting Lloyd, I am not convinced that Logan Valley must be overruled.
The foundation of Logan Valley consisted of this Court's decisions recognizing a right of access to streets, sidewalks, parks, and other public places historically associated with the exercise of First Amendment rights. Thus, the Court in Logan Valley observed that access to such forums "cannot constitutionally be denied broadly and absolutely." The importance of access to such places for speech-related purposes is clear, for they are often the only places for effective speech and assembly....
In Logan Valley we recognized what the Court today refuses to recognize -- that the owner of the modern shopping center complex, by dedicating his property to public use as a business district, to some extent displaces the "State" from control of historical First Amendment forums, and may acquire a virtual monopoly of places suitable for effective communication. The roadways, parking lots, and walkways of the modern shopping center may be as essential for effective speech as the streets and sidewalks in the municipal or company-owned town. I simply cannot reconcile the Court's denial of any role for the First Amendment in the shopping center with Marsh's recognition of a full role for the First Amendment on the streets and sidewalks of the company-owned town.
My reading of Marsh admittedly carried me farther than the Court in Lloyd, but the Lloyd Court remained responsive in its own way to the concerns underlying Marsh. Lloyd retained the availability of First Amendment protection when the picketing is related to the function of the shopping center, and when there is no other reasonable opportunity to convey the message to the intended audience. Preserving Logan Valley subject to Lloyd's two related criteria guaranteed that the First Amendment would have application in those situations in which the shopping center owner had most clearly monopolized the forums essential for effective communication. This result, although not the optimal one in my view, is nonetheless defensible....
In the final analysis, the Court's rejection of any role for the First Amendment in the privately owned shopping center complex stems, I believe, from an overly formalistic view of the relationship between the institution of private ownership of property and the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. No one would seriously question the legitimacy of the values of privacy and individual autonomy traditionally associated with privately owned property. But property that is privately owned is not always held for private use, and when a property owner opens his property to public use the force of those values diminishes. A degree of privacy is necessarily surrendered; thus, the privacy interest that petitioner retains when he leases space to 60 retail businesses and invites the public onto his land for the transaction of business with other members of the public is small indeed. And while the owner of property open to public use may not automatically surrender any of his autonomy interest in managing the property as he sees fit, there is nothing new about the notion that that autonomy interest must be accommodated with the interests of the public.
The interest of members of the public in communicating with one another on subjects relating to the businesses that occupy a modern shopping center is substantial. Not only employees with a labor dispute, but also consumers with complaints against business establishments, may look to the location of a retail store as the only reasonable avenue for effective communication with the public. As far as these groups are concerned, the shopping center owner has assumed the traditional role of the state in its control of historical First Amendment forums. Lloyd and Logan Valley recognized the vital role the First Amendment has to play in such cases, and I believe that this Court errs when it holds otherwise.