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A California law requires publication of the names of individuals arrested by state and local law enforcement agencies, but permits access to the addresses of these individuals only for certain statutorily-approved purposes. On 12/7/99, the Supreme Court upheld the law against a facial challenge. This challenge was brought by the United Reporting Publishing Corp., a company that sells the addresses of arrestees to attorneys, insurance companies, drug counselors, and others who wish to conduct business with the arrestees, which is an impermissible purpose under California law. Apparently unable to argue that application of the statute to it violated the First Amendment, the company contended that the statute violated the rights of others such as its potential customers and was therefore overbroad. The Supreme Court, however, held that overbreadth analysis was inapplicable because the law merely denied access to government information and, consequently, its application to the publisher would not chill the speech of others, at lease based upon information that they already possessed.

The Court did not rule on the publisher’s equal protection challenge to the California law, and, as Justice Scalia stressed in concurrence, the opinion did not preclude an "as applied" challenge to the law by the publisher’s customers and other speakers.