Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement

In Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement, 505 U.S. 123, 112 S.Ct. 2395, 120 L.Ed.2d 101 (1992), the Supreme Court appended an important limitation to a government's ability to recover such expenses. There, the Court found unconstitutional a city ordinance which required private groups to pay a license fee as a condition to engaging in demonstrations on public lands. The amount of the license fee was to be fixed by the county's Board of Commissioners "in order to meet the expense incident to the administration of the Ordinance and to the maintenance of public order in the matter licensed," but the fee was not to exceed one thousand dollars per day. Id. at 126-27, 112 S.Ct. at 2399-2400. The Court concluded that the ordinance was not content-neutral because "the fee assessed will depend on the administrator's measure of the amount of hostility likely to be created by the speech based on its content." Id. at 134, 112 S.Ct. at 2403.