Today, the Supreme Court decided Shurtleff v. City of Boston. Here, Boston allowed many private groups to raise flags at City Hall, but rejected a flag that included a cross. The city argued that the flag-raising program was government speech. The First Circuit agreed. The Supreme Court unanimously reversed.
Chief Justice Roberts assigned the majority opinion to Justice Breyer. This assignment makes sense. Breyer wrote the majority opinion in Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans. And Breyer is very much a son of Boston. He no doubt walked down Cambridge Street many times, and saw the flags flapping in the wind. That experience no doubt informed the first paragraph of Part I-A of the majority opinion:
The flagpole at issue stands at the entrance of Boston City Hall. See Appendix, infra. Built in the late 1960s, Boston City Hall is a raw concrete structure, an example of the brutalist style. Critics of the day heralded it as a public building that "articulates its functions" with "strength, dignity, grace, and even glamor." J. Conti, A New City Hall: Boston's Boost for Urban Renewal, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 12, 1969, p. 14. (The design has since proved somewhat more controversial. See, e.g., E. Mason, Boston City Hall Named World's Ugliest Building, Boston Herald (Nov. 15, 2008), https://www.bostonherald.com/2008/11/15/boston-city-hall-named-worlds-ugliest-building.)
