Demonstrations and the distribution of leaflets, statements, or petitions ... are permitted on the campus unless, or until, they disrupt regular essential operations of the University or significantly infringe on the rights of others. On the same grounds, the campus is open to speakers whom students, faculty, or staff wish to hear, and to recruiters for agencies and organizations in whom students or faculty have an interest. (University Regulations as passed by the Council of the Princeton University Community, May 1975, as amended 1976.)
(i)t is, of course, well-established that a State in the exercise of its police power may adopt reasonable restrictions on private property so long as the restrictions do not amount to a taking without just compensation.... (PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, supra, 447 U.S. at ——, 100 S.Ct. at 2040-2041, 64 L.Ed.2d at 752.)
To protect free speech and petitioning is a goal that surely matches the protecting of health and safety, the environment, aesthetics, property values and other societal goals that have been held to justify reasonable restrictions on private property rights. (Robins v. PruneYard Shopping Center, supra, 23 Cal.3d at 908, 592 P.2d at 346, 153 Cal.Rptr. at 859.)
In our view the circumstance that the property rights to the premises where the deprivation of liberty, here involved, took place, were held by others than the public, is not sufficient to justify the State's permitting a corporation to govern a community of citizens so as to restrict their fundamental liberties and the enforcement of such restraint by the application of a state statute. In so far as the State has attempted to impose criminal punishment on appellant for undertaking to distribute religious literature in a company town, its action cannot stand. (326 U.S. at 509, 66 S.Ct. at 280 (emphasis added))
(T)he State may not delegate the power, through the use of its trespass laws, wholly to exclude those members of the public wishing to exercise their First Amendment rights on the premises in a manner and for a purpose generally consonant with the use to which the property is actually put. (Id. at 560, 92 S.Ct. at 2224 (quoting Logan Valley, supra, 391 U.S. at 319-320, 88 S.Ct. at 1608) (emphasis added))
It would be an unwarranted infringement of property rights to require them to yield to the exercise of First Amendment rights under circumstances where adequate alternative avenues of communication exist. Such an accommodation would diminish property rights without significantly enhancing the asserted right of free speech. (Id. at 567, 92 S.Ct. at 2228)
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