Chiles v. Salazar · ¶51

Recognizing as much, our precedents in Cohen and Holder already foreclose exactly this move. California prosecuted Mr. Cohen under a law banning disturbances of the peace. Cohen, 403 U. S., at 16. The federal government threatened lawyers and doctors with prosecution under a law prohibiting support for terrorists. Holder, 561 U. S., at 10, 14–15, 25. In both cases, the government defended its actions on the ground that the law in question was generally aimed at certain types of conduct. But in both cases, we emphatically rejected that argument. Just because a law may “gen erally functio[n] as a regulation of conduct,” we held, does not exempt it from demanding First Amendment review when a government seeks to apply that law to speech alone. Id., at 27–28.

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