Law Professor: Ban Confederate Flag on License Plates
June 26, 2015
Contact: University Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
In an op-ed in The Baltimore Sun, Steven P. Grossman, the Dean Julius Isaacson Professor in the University of Baltimore School of Law, says that all states should ban the use of the Confederate flag on license plates. In past legal cases, Grossman says, plates have been declared more government speech than private speech, and therefore the state has the right to favor or oppose certain positions that could be found on a license plate.
"It is long past the time for Maryland as well as the other states to ban the use of the Confederate flag on the license plates they issue," grossman writes. "Most will agree that slavery was the greatest abomination ever perpetrated in the United States. Without getting into the endless debate about whether slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War, no one can argue that the secessionist states were, among other things, the defenders of this abominable institution. For a state to endorse a symbol of the defenders of slavery by putting the Confederate flag on representations of government speech is unconscionable."
Read the op-ed.
Learn more about Prof. Grossman.