Hello, this is Jeff Barnum reading the Supreme Court syllabus in Chiles V. Salazar, Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies et al. Sir Sorori to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Argued October 7th, 2025, decided March 31st, 2026. Kaylee Chiles holds a master's degree in clinical mental health and a state counseling license in Colorado. Miss Chiles does not begin counseling with any predetermined goals. Instead, she sits down with clients, discusses their goals, and then formulates methods of counseling that will most benefit them, seeking throughout to respect her clients' fundamental right of self-determination. On matters of sexuality and gender, Miss Chiles' clients, including young people, often have different goals. Some are content with their sexual orientation and gender identity and want help with social issues or family relationships, while others hope to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with their bodies. With all these clients, Ms. Childs seeks to help them reach their stated objectives, and she employs only talk therapy. In 2019, Colorado adopted a law prohibiting licensed counselors from engaging in conversion therapy with minors, defining the term to include any practice or treatment that attempts to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity, as well as any effort to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions towards individuals of the same sex. Yet the law explicitly allows counselors to provide acceptance, support, and understanding for identity exploration and development, and to assist persons undergoing gender transition. Miss Chiles filed suit in federal court seeking a preliminary injunction, raising a First Amendment challenge to the law as it applies to her talk therapy. Both the District Court and the Tenth Circuit determined that Miss Chiles had Article III standing to pursue her as applied pre-enforcement challenge. On the merits, however, both courts denied Miss Chiles' request for a preliminary injunction, reasoning that Colorado's law is best understood as regulating professional conduct and that it regulates speech only incidentally, thus triggering no more than a rational basis review under the First Amendment. This court granted Sir Sharori to resolve a circuit conflict over how the First Amendment interacts with laws like Colorado's when those laws are applied to talk therapy. HELD. Colorado's law banning conversion therapy, as applied to Miss Childs' talk therapy, regulates speech based on a viewpoint, and the lower courts erred by failing to apply sufficiently rigorous First Amendment scrutiny. The First Amendment protects the inalienable right of every individual to decide for himself how best to speak, and laws regulating speech based on its subject matter or communicative content are presumptively unconstitutional, triggering strict scrutiny that requires the government to prove its restriction is narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests. Viewpoint discrimination represents an even more egregious form of content regulation from which governments must nearly always abstain. The court has recognized only a few historic and traditional categories of expression, such as fraud, defamation, and fighting words, where content-based restrictions do not automatically trigger strict scrutiny. These categories are narrowly drawn and share a long and well-recognized historical pedigree. A law regulating the content of speech cannot avoid searching First Amendment review just because it mostly regulates non-expressive conduct. What matters is whether, in fact, the law regulates speech in the case at hand, as illustrated by Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15, a Supreme Court case from 1971, and Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 561 U.S. 1, a Supreme Court case from 2010. And the First Amendment's protections extend to licensed professionals as much as they do everyone else. That's National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, or NIFLA, versus Bacera, 585 U.S. 755, a Supreme Court case from 2018. As applied to Ms. Childs, Colorado's law regulates the content of her speech and goes further to prescribe what views she may and may not express, discriminating on the basis of viewpoint. The law permits her to express acceptance and support for her clients, exploring their identity or undergoing gender transition, but forbids her from saying anything that attempts to change a client's sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors, gender expressions, or romantic attractions. Her speech does not become conduct just because a government says so or because it may be described as a treatment or therapeutic modality. The First Amendment is no word game, and the exercise of constitutional rights cannot be circumscribed by mere labels. The fact that the state's viewpoint regulation falls only on licensed healthcare professionals does not change the equation. The First Amendment protects the right of all to speak their minds, and NIFLA expressly rejected the notion that professional speech is subject to diminished constitutional protection. History is littered with examples of governments that have sought to manipulate professional speech to increase state power, suppress minorities, and censor unpopular ideas. Colorado's law does not implicate any recognized exception to the court's usual First Amendment rules. It does not require disclosure of factual, non-controversial information in commercial speech, and as applied to Miss Chiles, it does not regulate conduct in a way that only incidentally burdens speech. All she does is speak, and speech is all Colorado seeks to regulate. Colorado's argument that the law regulates speech only incidentally fails because the court's speech incident to conduct doctrine asks whether the law restricts speech only because it is integrally related to unlawful conduct, or whether the law restricts expressive conduct only for reasons unrelated to its content. Colorado's law does neither. Miss Childs' speech does not bear a close causal connection to any separately unlawful conduct, and the state's law trains directly on the content of her speech, permitting some viewpoints, but not others. Colorado cannot establish that applying its law to Miss Childs falls within a long tradition of permissible content regulation. Colorado's arguments proceed at far too high a level of generality, asking the court to recognize a broad First Amendment free zone for the speech the state considers substandard care. The court's precedents foreclose aggregating discrete traditions of content-based regulations to sustain some new and broader category of lesser protected speech. Even taking each of the traditions Colorado evokes on its own terms, none supports the state's position. Colorado's suggestion that the statute represents a traditional law, licensing of medicine, fails because the state has not presented persuasive evidence of a historic tradition. The first state counselor licensure bill was adopted only in 1976, and because licensing laws have traditionally addressed qualifications, not dictated a professional's point of view. Colorado's analogy to informed consent laws fails because such laws regulate speech only incident to separate physical conduct and usually require disclosure of only factual and uncontroversial information, whereas Colorado's law, as applied to Miss Childs, seeks to silence a viewpoint she wishes to express. Finally, Colorado's invocation of traditional tort claims for malpractice fails because malpractice actions require exacting proof of injury caused by breach of duty, providing breathing room for protected speech, whereas Colorado's law threatens fines, probation, and loss of license simply for expressing a particular view, and does not allow clients to consent to practices that depart from the prevailing standard of care. The First Amendment stands as a bulwark against any effort to prescribe an orthodoxy of views, reflecting a belief that each American enjoys an inalienable right to speak his mind and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for finding truth. Laws like Colorado's which suppress speech based on viewpoint represent an egregious assault on both commitments. Reversed and remanded, Justice Gorsuch delivered the opinion of the court in which Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joined. Justice Kagan filed a concurring opinion in which Justice Sotomayor joined. Justice Jackson filed a dissenting opinion. Thank you for listening. Please help us by rating and reviewing this podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and make sure you subscribe so you can get all of the OT twenty five decisions automatically delivered to your device. 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