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 | In America and abroad, the work of Barry Fisher (above, far right, at a symposium on German intolerance) has had a common thread: championing religious freedom and tolerance. | |
Important Cases
His clients have included gypsies, American Indians, prison inmates, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hare Krishnas and members of the Unification Church. As he has said himself, “I am drawn to minority groups which have been unjustly attacked.” But, in talking to his colleagues, it becomes clear that those who have sought—and obtained—his help are many and varied for the simple reason that Fisher does not see First Amendment protections as something to which only “chosen” groups and individuals are entitled. “Barry remembers that many of those who founded America had been effectively driven out of their homelands for their religious beliefs,” said Rev. Dean Kelley of the National Council of Churches. “He sees the First Amendment in a broad way, and he knows an infringement of First Amendment rights when he sees it.”
Some of the most important cases involving religious issues bear Fisher’s stamp.
In 1987, he won a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court striking down a ban on soliciting at Los Angeles International Airport, concluding that the regulation went too far in limiting the right to free speech. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the court, said that “No conceivable governmental interest would justify such an absolute prohibition of speech.”
Fisher noted that this decision vindicated a series of lower court holdings that soliciting may be regulated but not prohibited. “The bottom line is that you can’t have a categorical prohibition like this one, and that is what the Court held,” he said.
He was also instrumental in obtaining the passage of a highly important piece of First Amendment legislation: California Civil Code section 425.14, originally passed into law in 1988 as California Senate Bill 1. The legislation which Fisher championed protects religious organizations from frivolous and vindictive punitive damages claims. “This law has changed the climate for religions in California,” said constitutional lawyer Tim Bowles, who also worked on the bill. “Barry deserves many thanks for his work to make it a reality.”
Fisher also worked extensively in environmental law and, for nearly three years, served as a founding staff attorney to the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in San Francisco. “Working to protect the environment is something that drove me then, and still does today,” he says. “The lands outside America’s city limits and the living things that dwell there offer a refuge for all of us, whether or not we avail ourselves of them. They represent the stuff of freedom—a place we can go, or at least know we could go.”
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