SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

ANDREI IANCU, UNDER SECRETARY OF COMMERCE FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND DIRECTOR, PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE, PETITIONER v. ERIK BRUNETTI

[June 24, 2019]

Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the Court.

Two Terms ago, in Matal v. Tam (2017), this Court invalidated the Lanham Act’s bar on the registration of “disparaging” trademarks. Although split between two non-majority opinions, all Members of the Court agreed that the provision violated the First Amendment because it discriminated on the basis of viewpoint. Today we consider a First Amendment challenge to a neighboring provision of the Act, prohibiting the registration of “immoral or scandalous” trademarks. Ibid. We hold that this provision infringes the First Amendment for the same reason: It too disfavors certain ideas.

I

Respondent Erik Brunetti is an artist and entrepreneur who founded a clothing line that uses the trademark FUCT. According to Brunetti, the mark (which functions as the clothing’s brand name) is pronounced as four letters, one after the other: F-U-C-T. But you might read it differently and, if so, you would hardly be alone. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 5 (describing the brand name as “the equivalent of [the] past participle form of a well-known word of profanity”). That common perception caused difficulties for Brunetti when he tried to register his mark with the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO).

Under the Lanham Act, the PTO administers a federal registration system for trademarks. Registration of a mark is not mandatory. The owner of an unregistered mark may still use it in commerce and enforce it against infringers. But registration gives trademark owners valuable benefits. For example, registration constitutes “prima facie evidence” of the mark’s validity. And registration serves as “constructive notice of the registrant’s claim of ownership,” which forecloses some defenses in infringement actions. Generally, a trademark is eligible for registration, and receipt of such benefits, if it is “used in commerce.” But the Act directs the PTO to “refuse registration” of certain marks. For instance, the PTO cannot register a mark that “so resembles” another mark as to create a likelihood of confusion. It cannot register a mark that is “merely descriptive” of the goods on which it is used. It cannot register a mark containing the flag or insignia of any nation or State. There are five or ten more (depending on how you count). And until we invalidated the criterion two years ago, the PTO could not register a mark that “disparaged” a “person, living or dead.”

This case involves another of the Lanham Act’s prohibitions on registration—one applying to marks that “consist of or comprise immoral or scandalous matter.” §1052(a). The PTO applies that bar as a “unitary provision,” rather than treating the two adjectives in it separately. To determine whether a mark fits in the category, the PTO asks whether a “substantial composite of the general public” would find the mark “shocking to the sense of truth, decency, or propriety”; “giving offense to the conscience or moral feelings”; “calling out for condemnation”; “disgraceful”; “offensive”; “disreputable”; or “vulgar.”

Both a PTO examining attorney and the PTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board decided that Brunetti’s mark flunked that test. The attorney determined that FUCT was “a total vulgar” and “therefore unregistrable.” On review, the Board stated that the mark was “highly offensive” and “vulgar,” and that it had “decidedly negative sexual connotations.” As part of its review, the Board also considered evidence of how Brunetti used the mark. It found that Brunetti’s website and products contained imagery, near the mark, of “extreme nihilism” and “anti-social” behavior. In that context, the Board thought, the mark communicated “misogyny, depravity, [and] violence.” The Board concluded: “Whether one considers [the mark] as a sexual term, or finds that [Brunetti] has used [the mark] in the context of extreme misogyny, nihilism or violence, we have no question but that [the term is] extremely offensive.”

Brunetti then brought a facial challenge to the “immoral or scandalous” bar in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That court found the prohibition to violate the First Amendment. As usual when a lower court has invalidated a federal statute, we granted certiorari.

II

This Court first considered a First Amendment challenge to a trademark registration restriction in Tam, just two Terms ago. There, the Court declared unconstitutional the Lanham Act’s ban on registering marks that “disparage” any “person, living or dead.” The eight-Justice Court divided evenly between two opinions and could not agree on the overall framework for deciding the case. But all the Justices agreed on two propositions. First, if a trademark registration bar is viewpoint-based, it is unconstitutional. And second, the disparagement bar was viewpoint-based.

The Justices thus found common ground in a core postulate of free speech law: The government may not discriminate against speech based on the ideas or opinions it conveys. In Justice Kennedy’s explanation, the disparagement bar allowed a trademark owner to register a mark if it was “positive” about a person, but not if it was “derogatory.” That was the “essence of viewpoint discrimination,” he continued, because “[t]he law thus reflects the Government’s disapproval of a subset of messages it finds offensive.”

. . . . So the key question becomes: Is the “immoral or scandalous” criterion in the Lanham Act viewpoint-neutral or viewpoint-based?

It is viewpoint-based. The meanings of “immoral” and “scandalous” are not mysterious, but resort to some dictionaries still helps to lay bare the problem. When is expressive material “immoral”? According to a standard definition, when it is “inconsistent with rectitude, purity, or good morals”; “wicked”; or “vicious.” Or again, when it is “opposed to or violating morality”; or “morally evil.” So the Lanham Act permits registration of marks that champion society’s sense of rectitude and morality, but not marks that denigrate those concepts. And when is such material “scandalous”? Says a typical definition, when it “gives offense to the conscience or moral feelings”; “excite[s] reprobation”; or “call[s] out condemnation.” Or again, when it is “shocking to the sense of truth, decency, or propriety”; “disgraceful”; “offensive”; or “disreputable.” So the Lanham Act allows registration of marks when their messages accord with, but not when their messages defy, society’s sense of decency or propriety. Put the pair of overlapping terms together and the statute, on its face, distinguishes between two opposed sets of ideas: those aligned with conventional moral standards and those hostile to them; those inducing societal nods of approval and those provoking offense and condemnation. The statute favors the former, and disfavors the latter. “Love rules”? “Always be good”? Registration follows. “Hate rules”? “Always be cruel”? Not according to the Lanham Act’s “immoral or scandalous” bar.

The facial viewpoint bias in the law results in viewpoint-discriminatory application. Recall that the PTO itself describes the “immoral or scandalous” criterion using much the same language as in the dictionary definitions recited above.

Here are some samples. The PTO rejected marks conveying approval of drug use (YOU CAN’T SPELL HEALTHCARE WITHOUT THC for pain-relief medication, MARIJUANA COLA and KO KANE for beverages) because it is scandalous to “inappropriately glamoriz[e] drug abuse.” But at the same time, the PTO registered marks with such sayings as D.A.R.E. TO RESIST DRUGS AND VIOLENCE and SAY NO TO DRUGS—REALITY IS THE BEST TRIP IN LIFE. Similarly, the PTO disapproved registration for the mark BONG HITS 4 JESUS because it “suggests that people should engage in an illegal activity [in connection with] worship” and because “Christians would be morally outraged by a statement that connects Jesus Christ with illegal drug use.” And the PTO refused to register trademarks associating religious references with products (AGNUS DEI for safes and MADONNA for wine) because they would be “offensive to most individuals of the Christian faith” and “shocking to the sense of propriety.” But once again, the PTO approved marks—PRAISE THE LORD for a game and JESUS DIED FOR YOU on clothing—whose message suggested religious faith rather than blasphemy or irreverence. Finally, the PTO rejected marks reflecting support for al-Qaeda (BABY AL QAEDA and AL-QAEDA on t-shirts) “because the bombing of civilians and other terrorist acts are shocking to the sense of decency and call out for condemnation.” Of course, all these decisions are understandable. The rejected marks express opinions that are, at the least, offensive to many Americans. But as the Court made clear in Tam, a law disfavoring “ideas that offend” discriminates based on viewpoint, in violation of the First Amendment.

How, then, can the Government claim that the “immoral or scandalous” bar is viewpoint-neutral? The Government basically asks us to treat decisions like those described above as PTO examiners’ mistakes. Still more, the Government tells us to ignore how the Lanham Act’s language, on its face, disfavors some ideas. In urging that course, the Government does not dispute that the statutory language—and words used to define it—have just that effect. At oral argument, the Government conceded: “If you just looked at the words like ‘shocking’ and ‘offensive’ on their face and gave them their ordinary meanings, they could easily encompass material that was shocking [or offensive] because it expressed an outrageous point of view or a point of view that most members” of society reject. But no matter, says the Government, because the statute is “susceptible of” a limiting construction that would remove this viewpoint bias. The Government’s idea, abstractly phrased, is to narrow the statutory bar to “marks that are offensive [or] shocking to a substantial segment of the public because of their mode of expression, independent of any views that they may express.” More concretely, the Government explains that this reinterpretation would mostly restrict the PTO to refusing marks that are “vulgar”—meaning “lewd,” “sexually explicit or profane.” Such a reconfigured bar, the Government says, would not turn on viewpoint, and so we could uphold it.

But we cannot accept the Government’s proposal, because the statute says something markedly different. This Court, of course, may interpret “ambiguous statutory language” to “avoid serious constitutional doubts.” But that canon of construction applies only when ambiguity exists. “We will not rewrite a law to conform it to constitutional requirements.” So even assuming the Government’s reading would eliminate First Amendment problems, we may adopt it only if we can see it in the statutory language. And we cannot. The “immoral or scandalous” bar stretches far beyond the Government’s proposed construction. The statute as written does not draw the line at lewd, sexually explicit, or profane marks. . . .

And once the “immoral or scandalous” bar is interpreted fairly, it must be invalidated. The Government just barely argues otherwise. In the last paragraph of its brief, the Government gestures toward the idea that the provision is salvageable by virtue of its constitutionally permissible applications (in the Government’s view, its applications to lewd, sexually explicit, or profane marks). In other words, the Government invokes our First Amendment overbreadth doctrine, and asks us to uphold the statute against facial attack because its unconstitutional applications are not “substantial” relative to “the statute’s plainly legitimate sweep.” But to begin with, this Court has never applied that kind of analysis to a viewpoint-discriminatory law. In Tam, for example, we did not pause to consider whether the disparagement clause might admit some permissible applications (say, to certain libelous speech) before striking it down. The Court’s finding of viewpoint bias ended the matter. And similarly, it seems unlikely we would compare permissible and impermissible applications if Congress outright banned “offensive” (or to use some other examples, “divisive” or “subversive”) speech. Once we have found that a law “aims at the suppression of” views, why would it matter that Congress could have captured some of the same speech through a viewpoint-neutral statute? But in any event, the “immoral or scandalous” bar is substantially overbroad. There are a great many immoral and scandalous ideas in the world (even more than there are swearwords), and the Lanham Act covers them all. It therefore violates the First Amendment.

We accordingly affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.