Noah Feldman, Columnist

Go Ahead, Hollywood, Keep Lying About Your Age

An effort to prevent age discrimination gets tripped up, unfortunately, by the First Amendment.

February 24, 2017 at 7:42 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."

SAG President Gabrielle Carteris, who played a 15-year-old on "Beverly Hills, 90210" at the age of 29.
Photographer: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for TNT

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Under existing doctrine, a federal district judge was probably right to temporarily block a California law designed to stop certain websites from listing actors' ages. But why shouldn't your age be a private fact you can keep to yourself? Not only can your age be used against you discriminatorily, but you also have a First Amendment right to lie about your age provided you aren’t engaging in fraud. This is an instance of a genuine, deep conflict between privacy and free speech. And in this instance, our system may have set the balance too far toward speech.

The law in question, California Assembly Bill 1687, was pushed by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, better known as the actors’ union. The law states its purpose right up front: “to ensure that information obtained on an Internet Web site regarding an individual’s age will not be used in furtherance of employment or age discrimination.”