Noah Feldman, Columnist

Brother, Spare Me a Dime. Or Else.

Panhandling is often defended as free speech, but the trouble lies in what beggars do, not what they say.

May 10, 2016 at 7:09 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Panhandling in New York.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Laws that ban street begging often are challenged as a violation of First Amendment free speech rights. Appellate courts are divided on the question, and the Supreme Court has never answered it definitively.

But in the last year, courts across the country have begun striking down laws against panhandling on the ground that they prohibit certain speech on the basis of its content. The reason is a major Supreme Court decision from last year that barred an Arizona town from using content to distinguish between different types of temporary signs erected on public property.