Dissenting. Here is the oral argument from april. Mr. Stewart thank you, mr. Chief justice, and may it please the court the lanham acts ban on federal registration of scandalous trademarks is not a restriction on speech but a valid condition on participation in a federal program. On its face, and as applied here, the provision is is viewpointneutral. The scandalous marks provision is one of many contentbased criteria for federal trademark registration, and consideration of a marks content is essential. Justice sotomayor could you please tell me how youre defining scandalous mark . From your brief, i thought you were giving it a different definition than has been used by the agency for a while. Mr. Stewart well, the the term the adjectives that have sometimes been used as synonyms for scandalous by the agency are terms like shocking, disgraceful, offensive, and disreputable. I think Justice Sotomayor well, if you use all those adjectives, you run headon to tam. Mr. Stewart i think one s
Background On June 19, in Matal v. Tam, the U.S. Supreme Court (Justice Gorsuch did not participate in the case) affirmed the Federal Circuit’s ruling that the Lanham Act’s “disparagement clause” is unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s free speech clause. The Patent and Trademark Office denied the Slants’ (an Asian rock group) federal trademark registration, relying on the Lanham Act’s prohibition on trademarks that “which may disparage . . .