Project Veritas Loses at the Ninth Circuit

The Ninth Circuit has reinstated Oregon’s ban on surreptitious public recordings. This reverses the Court’s 2023 panel decision I had previously written about.

In Project Veritas v. Michael Schmidt, the famous undercover group proactively sued Multnomah County and the State of Oregon over the law. Up to this point, the litigation hinged on standing.

Now the Ninth Circuit has ruled on the merits and upheld the law as constitutional. The Court found that the restriction is content-neutral. Therefore it meets the strict scrutiny standard for a restriction on speech.

That doesn’t mean you should now say anything in public without concern it will make its way to social media. One still needs to worry about selective enforcement.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.