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In separate cases appellate courts in New Jersey and Illinois have upheld statutes designed to prevent anti-hunting activists from using protests to disrupt hunting.
In the New Jersey case, three New Jersey residents were represented by Anna Charlton and Gary Francione of Rutgers Law School. Their lawsuit contended that the statute unconstitutionally restricted the three resident's right to free speech. By restricting where and when the activists could protest against hunting, the lawsuit argued, the state of New Jersey was unconstitutionally impinging on their right to express their views to hunters.
The appellate court upheld the statute so long as it is used to establish standards on the time, place and manner of anti-hunting protests rather than being used to quash all anti-hunting protests altogether. As the court put it,
[t]his construction places a reasonable limitation on the reach of the Hunter Harassment Statute in that it circumscribes the area where protesters may not be free to express their anti-hunting ideas, while preserving areas outside the immediate proximity of the hunting grounds for that purpose . . . By defining interference as a form of physical impediment, coupled with the general and specific intent requirements that solely implicate conduct, the statute is not an overboard regulation of First Amendment rights.
In the Illinois case, a court there granted an injunction to the Woodstock Hunt Club in Woodstock, Illinois, to bar members of the Chicago Animal Rights Coalition from protesting on the road outside the club using megaphones, air horns, sirens and other noisemaking devices. Chicago Animal Rights Coalition member Steve Hindi was arrested in 1996 for flying a motorized paraglider over hunters in order to scare away geese. Hindi was arrested and eventually sentenced to probation for violating the hunter interference statute.
Previously the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a portion of the hunter interference statute that unconstitutionally regulated the content of anti-hunting protests, but upheld the portion of the statute that set time and place restrictions on anti-hunting protests.
Which seems like an excellent compromise to me. Certainly animal rights activists should have the right to protest hunting and to communicate their opposition in public. On the other hand, this right to protest can be accommodated while also preserving the right of hunters to hunt without activists intentionally disrupting them.