A couple of weeks ago, I filed a cert petition in Georgia Ass'n of Club Executives v. Georgia and Georgia Ass'n of Club Executives v. O'Connell. (For procedural reasons, these were filed as two separate cases, but they raise identical issues, and the Georgia Supreme Court decided them in a combined opinion.)
Together with the team at Freed Grant LLC, we challenged a Georgia statute imposing a tax on adult entertainment establishments, a group of businesses defined in a content-discriminatory way, based on whether "[t]he entertainment or activity therein consists of nude or substantially nude persons dancing with or without music or engaged in movements of a sexual nature or movements simulating sexual intercourse, oral copulation, sodomy, or masturbation . . . ." Our position was that, as a content-discriminatory enactment, this tax should be evaluated under strict scrutiny—and should fail because the government could have raised the same amount of taxes in a non-content-discriminatory way, out of general revenues.
This case should be of interest even if you're not interested in adult entertainment (indeed, even if you're hostile to adult entertainment). The big question here is whether a facially content-discriminatory enactment (that would otherwise be evaluated under strict scrutiny) should be considered content-neutral (and thus evaluated under intermediate scrutiny) if it has a content-neutral justification. This means this case is closely related to the abortion-clinic buffer-zone cases that rely on Hill v. Colorado—and, as you may have read on this blog (here or here), the Supreme Court has recently denied cert in a case that presented the issue of whether to overruled Hill.
