Book Launch / “Permitting Art: Visual Arts and the First Amendment on the Streets of New York,” with Legal Scholar (and First-Time Street Vendor) Brian Soucek

Date: Saturday, 9 November 2024, 2–5 pm
Location: Outdoors at the southwest corner of West Houston St and Broadway, New York
FREE! No RSVP necessary!
Information about the panel discussion featuring Brian Soucek and Jonathan Gilmore is available here.

Please come, rain or shine, to see the premise of our new book—legal scholar Brian Soucek’s Permitting Art: Visual Arts and the First Amendment on the Streets of New York—in action!

The first volume in Cabinet’s “Art before the Law” series, Permitting Art examines two federal cases, brought a decade apart, challenging vending laws that prevented artworks from being sold on the streets of New York City without a permit. Booksellers like Soucek had always been exempted from this requirement because words are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and in 1995, a group of New York artists filed a federal suit against the city claiming that the visual arts are also a form of speech and should be similarly exempted. Their successful case resulted in sweeping changes to the vending laws, which is why you are now able to buy artworks on the street more or less anywhere in the city.

For this launch event, we will take full advantage of the First Amendment and sell not only Soucek’s book (signed, and vended, by him personally) but also some works of art. Street vending is a difficult art; please drop by to buy a book or an artwork, have a chat, and, if so inclined, boost our author’s morale by bringing him a warming cup of coffee and some nice little cookies.

About the Author
Brian Soucek is professor of law and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches constitutional law, civil procedure, and art law. Before receiving his JD from Yale Law School, Soucek completed a PhD in the philosophy of art at Columbia University and taught at the University of Chicago, where he was co-chair of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Soucek’s interdisciplinary work spanning law and aesthetics was cited to the US Supreme Court in the 5Pointz aerosol art case and 303 Creative, the case that determined whether web designers have an expressive exemption from antidiscrimination laws. His articles include “Aesthetic Judgment in Law,” Alabama Law Review, 2017; “The Constitutional Irrelevance of Art,” North Carolina Law Review, 2021; “Censorship and Subsidy,” in A Companion to Arthur C. Danto (Wiley Blackwell, 2022); “Censorship and Selective Support for the Arts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art (Oxford University Press, 2023); and “Tax Law as Muse,” Cornell Law Review, 2025. He is a recent trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and a fellow of the University of California’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.