Over the past few decades, many of the most significant federal1 and state court2 decisions on the constitutionality of local zoning rules have involved adult entertainment establishments. That is because adult entertainment, unlike obscenity,3 has been held by the U.S. Supreme Court to be protected by the First Amendment, and the Court has permitted local governments to treat adult entertainment establishments and the activities they support as different from “core” First Amendment speech.
For example, in 1976, in Young v. American Mini Theatres Inc.,4 the Court upheld zoning ordinances providing that adult theaters could not be located within 1,000 feet of any two other “regulated uses,” nor within 500 feet of a residential area. The Court concluded that “[t]he city’s interest in planning and regulating the use of property for commercial purposes is clearly adequate to support that kind of [minimum spacing] restriction.” The Court held that “apart from the fact that the ordinances treat adult theaters differently from other theaters and the fact that the classification is predicated on the content of material shown in the respective theaters, the regulation of the place where such films may be exhibited does not offend the First Amendment.”
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