A Case That Brought Everyone to the Table

Several years ago, five student organizations at Saint Louis University School of Law co-sponsored my visit: the Student Intellectual Property Law Association, the Sports and Entertainment Law Association, the Asian-American Law Students Association, the American Constitution Society, and the Federalist Society.

They ordered pizza together. Nobody seemed to find this remarkable.

When you give student organizations a shared stake in an event and invite them all to be part of it, the tension that outside observers expect often simply doesn't materialize. They were all at the table. The pizza was free. The conversation was open. And a First Amendment case that had been treated in the press as a flashpoint turned out to be, in that room, something that brought people together rather than divided them.

Similar gatherings happened at Levin College of Law, Notre Dame Law, and others. The case attracted a wide cross-section of people with genuinely different views — IP attorneys and constitutional scholars, identity-based student organizations, political advocacy groups from opposite ends of the spectrum. What they shared was curiosity about a case that touched something most of them cared about, even if they cared about it for different reasons. Just like every sitting justice of the Supreme Court.

2017 was a consequential year. Oral arguments in January. The opinion in June. Invitations kept coming after that — nearly every law school and bar association wanted me to appear. Sometimes people genuinely wanted to wrestle with the case. Sometimes they just wanted a selfie with someone whose name appeared on a Supreme Court opinion. Being a First Amendment matter brought attention from across the political spectrum, which meant spending a lot of that year in rooms where the people around me didn't usually share a speaking platform.

What I noticed early on was that the tension in those rooms was rarely between the audience members. It was mostly between me and a particular kind of engagement with my case.

Law professors and attorneys who had spent years developing First Amendment and trademark expertise had strong views, which was understandable. Many were skeptical of our position — often out of legitimate concern that a ruling in our favor might help the Washington Football Team keep a racist mascot. They worried that protecting our mark might also protect marks they found reprehensible. Civil liberties often involve exactly that discomfort. But in working through those concerns, some had accepted the USPTO's framing of who we were and what we were doing without much scrutiny. To them, it was a case to be analyzed. To me, it was eight years of my life.

I was often invited onto panels to debate the merits alongside law professors, and I didn't mind. I'd spent nearly a decade studying the legal arguments and knew our briefs as well as anyone. But some panelists didn't quite know what to make of me — I didn't have the right credentials, and the filtered version of our story that had come through legal documents didn't fully resemble the person sitting across from them.

One professor, skeptical of our position, refused to say the band's name during the entire panel. Instead they referred to us as "The S-Word" — as though it carried direct equivalency to one of the most harmful slurs in the English language, and as though the history of reappropriation, the community context, and years of documented work with Asian American audiences simply didn't exist. It wasn't a legal argument. It was a rhetorical move that required treating the word as inherently contaminated regardless of who was using it or why, and in the context of a serious legal discussion, it was difficult to take seriously.

Things shifted when I stopped leading with the legal arguments.

I started opening with a story: our band performing inside a prison, a cover of "Paint It Black," a sea of orange and denim jumping to the music, and then — immediately after the concert — a large man with the words "White Power" tattooed across him approaching me. He handed me a piece of paper, and I noticed his hands were holding a very sharp pencil. The room went silent. And then he asked for an autograph. "It's for my daughter," he said.

The people who had arrived with preconceived notions about the band and the case — notions shaped largely by legal briefs and media coverage — started to recalibrate. Showing our actual work, and what it meant to people, broke through in ways the legal arguments alone hadn't. The conversations stopped being debates about policy and started being conversations about people with real stakes. That shift, almost universally, moved things toward agreement — not because the legal arguments changed, but because the moral and ethical dimensions became harder to dismiss.

Most people, across ideological lines, agreed when they heard the full context: the USPTO was wrong to label The Slants as disparaging. That agreement didn't always rest on First Amendment grounds. Some who believed the government ought to have some role in regulating trademarks still concluded that this particular application of that power was unjust. The ethical argument and the legal argument pointed in the same direction, and people got there independently.

The moot court dimension made this even more vivid. By 2017 and 2018, my case had been adopted for moot court competitions at law schools across the country, with students arguing both sides before ever meeting me. When I showed up at their schools afterward, the students who had argued against my position said the same thing: it was a hard side to defend. The Federal Circuit decision had narrowed the viable arguments significantly, and the inconsistency in how the disparagement provision had been applied across different communities was genuinely difficult to justify. Some found it amusing to admit they'd argued against me and ended up agreeing with the outcome. Even those who believed in principle that the government should have some regulatory role in trademarks tended to conclude that the government had gotten it wrong in our case.

What struck me was how consistent that conclusion was across people who'd arrived at the question from very different starting points — Federalist Society members and ACS members, IP specialists and civil liberties advocates, people primarily concerned with free expression and people primarily concerned with protecting marginalized communities from harmful language. They reached the same place through different routes, once they were engaging with the actual facts rather than the abstracted legal question.

Of course, these audiences weren't representative samples of the American electorate. They were people willing to spend an evening discussing constitutional law. But precisely because they began from very different commitments, their convergence still surprised me.

Civil liberties questions — First Amendment questions especially — are regularly treated as culture war terrain, where positions map predictably onto political identity. In my experience, that mapping breaks down quickly when the conversation is grounded in a specific case with specific human stakes.

My case was, in some ways, an easier entry point than most. A socially conscious band fighting a government agency's decision about their own name is a more sympathetic narrative than many First Amendment cases produce, and I'm aware of that. But I think the sympathy was doing real work: it made it possible for people to feel the weight of what's actually at stake when the government decides whose expression is legitimate. What happens when whoever holds power finds your speech disagreeable — regardless of your intent, regardless of how the communities most affected actually feel? That question lands differently when there's a person in the room who lived it.

The Federalist Society and the ACS don't agree on much. But they ordered pizza together at Saint Louis University School of Law, sat in the same room, and by the end of the evening, everyone felt like this was a conversation worth having. Even those who disagreed but attended anyway — I don't know if I changed their minds about the case, but I think they realized silencing others wasn't the path to justice. Civic engagement often begins this way: not with consensus, but with the willingness to sit at the same table long enough to discover where agreement is possible.

I speak on First Amendment law, civil liberties, and finding common ground across ideological lines at law schools, bar associations, and civic organizations. If these questions connect to programming you're planning, simontam.org/ip-law-keynote-speaker and simontam.org/colleges-and-universities are the places to start.