Bates v. City of Little Rock

Bates v. City of Little Rock, 361 U.S. 516 (1960), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbade state government to compel the disclosure of an organization's membership lists via a tax-exemption regulatory scheme.

Bates v. City of Little Rock
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued November 18, 1959 Decided February 23, 1960
Full case name	Bates et al. v. City of Little Rock et al.
Citations	361 U.S. 516 (more) 80 S. Ct. 412; 4 L. Ed. 2d 480; 1960 U.S. LEXIS 1601
Case history
Prior	Certiorari to the Supreme Court of Arkansas
Subsequent	229 Ark. 819, 319 S. W. 2d 37, reversed.
Holding
State governments cannot compel the disclosure of an organization's membership lists when it inhibits freedom of association.
Court membership
Chief Justice Earl Warren Associate Justices Hugo Black · Felix Frankfurter William O. Douglas · Tom C. Clark John M. Harlan II · William J. Brennan Jr. Charles E. Whittaker · Potter Stewart
Case opinions
Majority	Stewart, joined by unanimous court
Concurrence	Black and Douglas
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. I and XIV

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Bates v. City of Little Rock

This is a companion case to NAACP v. Alabama (1958), which also held that NAACP membership records are protected by First Amendment freedom of association, and Talley v. California (1960), 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 (1973) and Brown v. Socialist Workers '74 Campaign Committee (1982).