GIBSON v. FLORIDA LEGISLATIVE INVESTIGATION COMMISSION 372 U.S. 539 (1963)

The committee ordered the president of the Miami branch of the NAACP to produce his membership records and refer to them when the committee asked whether specific individuals, suspected of being communists, were NAACP members. Earlier committee attempts to expose the NAACP's entire membership list showed that the communist issue was a screen behind which the state sought to use publicity to weaken a group engaged in activities aimed at racial equality and desegregation.

The Supreme Court, 5–4, held that Gibson's conviction for contempt for refusal to produce the records infringed the freedom of association, which protected associational privacy. The Court, in an opinion by Justice arthur goldberg, was prepared to balance the state interest in legislative investigation against this first amendment interest, but it held that such an infringement could be constitutional only if "the state convincingly show[s] a substantial relation between the information sought and a subject of overriding and compelling state interest, " and that Florida had not done so in this instance. Accordingly Gibson's conviction was invalidated.

Gibson and its predecessor, Bates v. Little Rock (1960), must be read in conjunction with the balancing test applied to a congressional investigation into communist activity in barenblatt v. united states (1959). The later cases may be read narrowly to distinguish Barenblatt and provide greater constitutional protection from investigative exposure only for "groups which themselves are neither engaged in subversive or other illegal … activities nor demonstrated to have any substantial connections with such activities." Alternatively, Bates and Gibson can be seen to modify the balancing test of Barenblatt to a "preferred position" balancing in which the government must show a compelling interest before it can invade associational privacy.

Martin Shapiro
(1986)