CIR Statement on Chiles v. Salazar and What It Means for Our Louisiana Case 

Yesterday, the Supreme Court delivered a clear rebuke to states that try to regulate professional speech as conduct. In Chiles v. Salazar, the Court held that Colorado’s ban on talk therapy regulates speech based on viewpoint—and that courts must apply strict scrutiny, not the toothless rational-basis test lower courts had accepted. The First Amendment demands more than a rubber stamp. 

The 8-1 ruling closes a loophole governments have exploited for years: Label a speech restriction as “professional conduct regulation,” and suddenly the First Amendment barely applies. The Court rejected this. Writing for the high court, Justice Gorsuch put it plainly: “The First Amendment is no word game. And the rights it protects cannot be renamed away or their protections nullified by ‘mere labels.’” 

This definitive ruling in Chiles v. Salazar is a significant victory for the First Amendment and directly affects one of CIR’s pending cases.

Currently, CIR is challenging a Louisiana law that bans licensed professional counselors from using the words “psychology” or “psychological” to describe their work. Our clients, Julie Alleman and Juliet Catrett, are seasoned trauma therapists who were threatened with criminal prosecution simply for using accurate, widely understood language to describe the services they provide to clients. In addition, Louisiana prohibits everyone but licensed psychologists from engaging in a broadly-defined “practice of psychology.” Like Colorado, Louisiana has dressed up this speech restriction as a routine licensing regulation. Chiles makes clear that courts must look past that label. Louisiana cannot ban speech by characterizing it as “conduct,” just as it cannot ban accurate speech to advantage one group of licensed practitioners over another by restricting the language of their competition. 

Darpana Sheth, General Counsel for the Center for Individual Rights, issued the following statement: 

“Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling should end the fiction that governments can silence licensed professionals simply by calling it professional regulation. A therapist’s words to a willing client are speech—and the First Amendment protects them whether the state finds those words inconvenient or not. Chiles v. Salazar is a victory for every professional the government has tried to muzzle through the back door of licensing law, and it goes straight to the heart of what we are fighting for in Louisiana. Granting a license to practice does not give the government a license to censor.”

We look forward to pressing that principle on behalf of Julie Alleman and Juliet Catrett in the courts below.