Dana's Railroad Supply v. Attorney General, No. 14-14426 (11th Cir. 2015)
Annotate this CasePlaintiffs filed suit challenging the facial validity of Florida's no-surcharge law under the First Amendment. Florida makes it a second-degree misdemeanor for “[a] sellor or lessor in a sales or lease transaction” to “impose a surcharge on the buyer or lessee for electing to use a credit card,” Fla. Stat. 501.0117(1)–(2), while the State expressly allows “the offering of a discount for the purpose of inducing payment by cash.” The court concluded that it must strike down section 501.0117 as an unconstitutional abridgment of free speech. The court concluded that Florida’s no-surcharge law directly targets speech to indirectly affect commercial behavior. It does so by discriminating on the basis of the speech’s content, the identity of the speaker, and the message being expressed. Because the at-best plausible justifications on which the no-surcharge law rest provide no firm anchor, the law does not pass under any level of heightened First Amendment scrutiny
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