The U.S. Supreme Court decided against hearing an investigative journalism organization’s First Amendment-based challenge to a decades-old Oregon law prohibiting most secret recordings of oral conversations.
The undercover journalism group Project Veritas had argued that the state’s conversational privacy statute violated the First Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled 9–2 in January that the law did not violate the group’s free speech rights.
The Supreme Court dismissed the petition in Project Veritas v. Vasquez without comment in an unsigned order on Oct. 6. No justices dissented.
The respondents were sued in their official capacities. One is Nathan Vasquez, district attorney for Multnomah County; the other is Dan Rayfield, attorney general of Oregon….