I haven’t read the decision in much depth yet, but the Third Circuit Court of Appeals this week upheld a Philadelphia ban on employer inquiries into job applicants’ wage history.

This is part of a troubling trend. More and more governments are banning inquiries into information that they don’t want people to use. Seattle and other cities have begun banning criminal background checks by landlords. Portland is set to pass a law that bans landlords from asking about a person’s immigration status. Other municipalities have passed and likely will pass more laws banning inquiries into wage history. The Third Circuit opinion will make it much harder to challenge this kind of speech restriction.

The Third Circuit decision held that the wage inquiry ban should be subject to the “commercial speech” test. In First Amendment jurisprudence, courts are more forgiving of restrictions on commercial speech than other types of speech. This doctrine, however, is meant to be reserved for advertisements, not any speech that happens to be related to a possible transaction. Here, the Third Circuit extended the rule to include questions asked in the context of an anticipated transaction–an employment contract. This is an unfortunate expansion of a doctrine that arguably shouldn’t exist at all. The First Amendment doesn’t distinguish between commercial and other types of speech, and neither should the courts.