Noah Feldman, Columnist

Supreme Court's Robocall Ban Has a Big Downside

A partial dissent by Stephen Breyer reveals the true stakes.

July 6, 2020 at 4:30 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."

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There’s more than meets the eye in today’s Supreme Court decision striking down a 2015 law that allows some robocalls to your mobile phone — namely, calls seeking to collect government debts.

On the surface, the court straightforwardly said that if Congress bans robocalls across the board (as it did in the 1990s) it violates the First Amendment to make an exception for calls with certain content (as it did in 2015). Sensibly, the court didn’t re-allow all robocalls; it just eliminated the more recent debt collection exception.