Breaking News: Supreme Court Reverses Ninth Circuit, Reimposes Stay in Washington Referendum Signer Case

So reports SCOTUSblog. There was one dissent. More to come...

UPDATE: You can read the order here. Justice Stevens dissented, but he has not issued any opinion related to his dissent. The stay remains in effect until a petition for cert. is considered in timely fashion, with the result being that the information will not be disclosed until (at the least) after the election. That is somewhat problematic, not for formal mootness grounds, but because the interests in disclosure are different before and after the election.

I think that either in this case or eventually the Court is going to have to address disclosure issues again. The Court has generally been supportive of disclosure in the campaign finance context, but it has recognized in the McIntyre case some right to anonymous campaign spending. It has also been less supportive of disclosure in the context of ballot measure circulation, with the leading case here the ACLF case.

Notably, all of these issues arose before the Internet revolution, and the ease with which information flows on the Internet in a way that it never has before. One of the most thoughtful pieces on this question is Bill McGeveran's Mrs. McIntyre's Checkbook.

And there's a discussion of these issues at pages 64-66 of the 2009 supplement the the Lowenstein, Hasen, and Tokaji casebook in relation to the disclosure of donors to California's Prop. 8 measure. The Washington case differs in that these are ballot measure signers, not contributors.

Posted by Rick Hasen at October 20, 2009 12:08 PM