David Atkins, who has a professional liability practice, lectures lawyers about the importance of choosing clients who are not so unrealistic, demanding, or nutty as to be surely never satisfied and the guaranteed source of grievances. He argues that we are not public buses and don’t have to pick up clients on every corner. Good advice from a risk-management perspective, but maybe illegal from an anti-discrimination point of view.
A recent decision of the New Mexico Supreme Court in Elane Photography v. Vanesa Willock dealt with a photography studio that refused to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony. The issue was whether the conduct, which was freely admitted and not in question, violated the New Mexico Human Rights Act. New Mexico, as do 20 or so other states, has a law that includes sexual orientation in its prohibitions on discrimination. The studio claimed that it had a constitutional right to limit the sale of its services to “traditional weddings” and that any law requiring it to offer the same services it offers to “traditional” spouses to others who may not be so “traditional” violated its rights to free speech and free expression under the First Amendment.
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