Does the Constitution Protect Solicitation? The Supreme Court Was Asked To Decide

Two years after the Supreme Court ruled that cities can punish homeless people for sleeping in public places, Alabama wants the high court to end protections for public begging.

Constitutional issues are different. In 2024, the court held that fining or imprisoning someone for sleeping outside when there are no shelter beds does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

In Alabama’s pending petition, the state argues that solicitation was the most criminal of its kind in the nation’s history and therefore should not be protected speech under the First Amendment.

Although the legal strategy may be a long shot, Alabama is hoping that the judges will want to hear its request for one of the same reasons that the city of Oregon’s sleep ban was taken: local governments’ requests for help with the nation’s homelessness crisis.

“Our cities cannot control this problem without the full extent of their traditional police powers,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall told the court in a complaint sponsored by 19 GOP attorneys general from other states.

‘Today is me, tomorrow can be you’

Alabama asked the court to decide whether the Constitution prohibits a broad ban on hard labor, like two Alabama laws that have been successfully challenged so far by Jonathan Singleton, a homeless Montgomery resident.

Singleton was cited six times for violating the state law against soliciting donations, including holding a sign that read “NO HOME. Today it’s me, tomorrow it could be you” while standing in the grass near a freeway exit.

Violators can be fined up to $500 and up to three months in jail under one anti-solicitation law and fines up to $100 and 10 days in jail under the anti-solicitation law.

Alabama’s solicitation ban has been blocked by lower courts

After Singleton filed a class-action lawsuit in 2020, lower courts blocked enforcement of the rules.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2025 decision cited its earlier ruling in a separate Florida case that solicitation is speech protected by the First Amendment.

The three-judge panel said Alabama’s laws differed from a ban on hard labor on Fort Lauderdale beaches that the appeals court upheld in 1999 because Fort Lauderdale’s limits were not citywide.

In a complaint that includes several references to the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision on the ban on sleeping outside, Alabama argues that cities and states need more freedom to deal with the problem of homelessness and the “dramatic growth” of the public’s need to address begging.

“At the time of the founding, states often prohibited idling, loitering without a business or abode, street begging, and so on,” Marshall wrote. “The basic theory, inherited from the English, was to separate those who could work (but refused) from those who could not.”

Courts have held that solicitation is protected by the First Amendment

Singleton’s attorneys, some of whom work for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Homelessness Law Center, argue that the historic laws Alabama cites “criminalize the behavior of voluntary inaction, not the communicative aspect of begging.”

And even if it did cover solicitation, Singleton’s lawyers say, First Amendment protections aren’t determined by which laws are on the books at one time.

That’s why Alabama’s argument breaks with the position taken by courts across the country and against Supreme Court precedent that “is long and unbroken recognizing that free speech is protected by the First Amendment,” his lawyers wrote.

When it launched the lawsuit in 2020, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Alabama “should provide more resources for housing, shelter and health care that will meet those needs rather than jailing or ticketing people who ask for help.”

Alabama’s appeal is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court in closed session on February 20. Four of the nine justices must want to hear the case for it to be accepted for review.

The court dismisses the dozens of appeals it receives each year.

This article first appeared in USA TODAY: Does the Constitution protect solicitation? The Supreme Court asked to take a decision

Maureen Groppe reports, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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