North Carolina can’t ban undercover filming inside animal farms

The Fourth Circuit ruled that a North Carolina law aimed at ending undercover investigations violates the First Amendment

By Rachel Weiner
February 23, 2023 at 5:02 p.m. EST

A North Carolina law aimed at stopping investigations by animal rights activists violates constitutional free speech protections, an appellate court ruled Thursday.

The 2015 law bars employees from going into “nonpublic areas of an employer’s premises” for reasons unrelated to work and gathering documents or making recordings that “breach the person’s duty of loyalty to the employer.”

It was one of a wave of laws passed across the country in response to undercover exposés of the mistreatment of animals in large factory farms. Every one challenged in federal court has been found at least in part unconstitutional, said David Muraskin of Public Justice, a legal nonprofit that led a group challenge to the law. This decision is particularly important, he said, because it ties together several elements used in other recent so-called “ag-gag laws” — it did not specifically target agriculture, it created civil liability rather than a new crime, and it focused on recording and data collection.

That the court still deemed the law unconstitutional shows, Muraskin said, “that the ability of people to conduct investigations and expose misconduct is protected by the First Amendment.”

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