The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that personalized license plates are government speech and not subject to the First Amendment's ban on viewpoint discrimination.
At the center of the case was plaintiff Leah Gilliam's personalized Tennessee license plate, "69PWNDU," which she held for more than a decade before the state revoked it in 2021 on the grounds that it was offensive. Gilliam filed a civil rights lawsuit, arguing that the underlying state law used to revoke her plates was unconstitutional on its face.
Although the Tennessee Supreme Court noted that most other courts considering the issue had come to contrary conclusions, it nevertheless upheld the state's regulations: "Applying the three factors that the United States Supreme Court has traditionally employed in its government speech precedents, we conclude that personalized alphanumeric combinations on Tennessee's license plates are government speech," the court wrote.
