For Educators: Teaching Matal v. Tam

In 2006, Simon Tam founded The Slants, an all-Asian American dance rock band based in Portland, Oregon. The name was intentional. "The Slants" is a term that has long been used as a racial slur against people of Asian descent, and Tam wanted to reclaim it: to take a word historically used to denigrate his community and turn it into something the community owned and defined for itself. This practice, known as reappropriation, has a long history in the culture of traditionally marginalized communities, but it was about to create a legal fight that would go all the way to the Supreme Court.

When Tam applied to register "The Slants" as a federal trademark in 2010, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) rejected the application, using a provision in the Lanham Act (the federal law governing trademarks) that prohibited registering any mark that could "disparage" a person, group, or institution. In the government's view, "The Slants" disparaged people of Asian descent, and therefore couldn't be registered. It didn't matter that the band was Asian American, or that the name was chosen to empower rather than demean. The government's position was that it had the authority to decide which names were acceptable.

Tam disagreed. And he was willing to fight for it.

What followed was an eight-year legal battle through multiple layers of the federal court system which included the USPTO, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB), U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the Supreme Court of the United States. Tam argued that the government's power to deny trademark registration based on the perceived offensiveness of a name was a form of viewpoint discrimination. Essentially, the government was, in effect, choosing which ideas and identities were acceptable to express in the commercial marketplace. That, he argued, violated the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.

In 2017, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed. The Court ruled unanimously — a rare alignment across ideological lines on a First Amendment question.

In Matal v. Tam, all eight sitting justices ruled that the Lanham Act's disparagement clause was unconstitutional: the government cannot deny a trademark simply because it finds the name offensive or controversial. The decision reaffirmed a foundational principle of First Amendment law: that the government does not get to pick which ideas are able to be expressed.

The ruling had immediate and far-reaching consequences. It affected other pending trademark cases, shaped subsequent First Amendment challenges to federal law, and established new precedent for how courts evaluate government restrictions on speech in commercial contexts. It is now regularly taught in constitutional law, intellectual property law, Asian American studies, and civics courses across the country. And, the case is regularly cited in legal decisions protecting freedom of expression today.

But beyond the legal doctrine, Matal v. Tam is a story about identity: who gets to define a community, who gets to decide what words mean, and what it costs to spend eight years insisting that you have the right to name yourself.

The full Supreme Court opinion is available at the Supreme Court of the United States website. Simon's firsthand account of the case is told in his memoir, Slanted: How an Asian American Troublemaker Took on the Supreme Court.