Resource: How the Fourteenth and First Amendments Clash and Provide Both Too many and Too Few First Amendment Protections

In Edge v. City of Everett, the District Court properly assessed the constitutionality of the Citywide Ordinance and the Dress Code Ordinance. However, the court used incorrect cases and reasoning, and failed to apply a high enough level of scrutiny to the Dress Code Ordinance, despite the low threshold of “intermediate scrutiny” required for content neutral ordinances. In Edge, Plaintiffs filed a motion for preliminary injunction alleging Everett’s Citywide Ordinance and Dress Code Ordinance were unconstitutional, “bringing causes of action [under] the First Amendment; the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; Substantive Due Process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment; Article I Sections 5 and 12 of the Washington State Constitution; and 42 U.S.C. § 1983.” Upon review, the District Court granted Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction on the bases that both the Citywide Ordinance and Dress Code Ordinance were unconstitutionally vague under the Fourteenth Amendment, and that the Dress Code Ordinance was a content neutral prohibition that failed intermediate scrutiny, therefore violating the First Amendment. Although the District Court was correct regarding the Citywide Ordinance being unconstitutionally vague, this unconstitutionality has great ramifications for the city in limiting its ability to write legislation which regulates significant government interests. In short, while correct in its overall determination that the Dress Code Ordinance is unconstitutional under both the First and Fourteenth Amendments,8 portions of the court’s reasoning blatantly disregard the realities of the ordinances. The reasoning behind the Dress Code Ordinance and the Ordinance’s implications make this especially true.