Bates v. City of Little Rock


Bates v. City of Little Rock, 361 U.S. 516, was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbade state governments from compelling the disclosure of an organization's membership lists via a tax-exemption regulatory scheme.
This was a companion case to NAACP v. Alabama, which also held that NAACP membership records are protected by First Amendment freedom of association, and Talley v. California, which held that Talley, a civil rights activist, could not be fined for an anonymous flyer. These cases help establish the right to privacy under the First Amendment, expanded on in Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Socialist Workers '74 Campaign Committee.
The court, citing De Jonge v. Oregon and NAACP v. Alabama, compared freedom of association to other First Amendment rights that were incorporated: " is now beyond dispute that freedom of association for the purpose of advancing ideas and airing grievances is protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from invasion by the States."