Local laws in a number of cities in the United States prohibiting all door-to-door solicitation without prior invitation of the occupant. They are named after Green River, Wyoming, where in 1931 one of the first such laws was enacted.
In Martin v. Struthers, 319 U.S. 141 (1943), the Supreme Court of the United States held that a municipality could not forbid the free distribution of brochures “advertising a religious meeting.” In Breard v. Alexandria, 341 U.S. 622 (1951), the Court upheld a Green River ordinance in a case involving solicitors for subscriptions to secular magazines such as Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek . The Court said the ordinance was a valid exercise of the city’s police power to regulate commerce.
Some commentators suggest the Breard case allows Green River ordinances to be used to bar the work of literature evangelists. But in Louisiana, where the Breard case arose, it had already been held that literature evangelists do not fall within the ordinance because they are neither “solicitors, peddlers, hawkers, itinerant merchants or transient vendors” ( Shreveport v. Teague, 200 La. 679, 8 So.2d 640 [1941]). In Green River v. Martin, 61 Wyo. 81, 254 P.2d 198 (1953), the language of the ordinance was held to be directed only to commercial activities. In City of Anchorage v. Berry, 145 F.Supp. 868 (1956), the court pointed out that the Breard case involved a “transaction of a commercial nature” and that the literature evangelist makes door-to-door calls “for the primary purpose of preaching his religion in an attempt to proselyte followers for his religious beliefs and congregation; thus, the sale, if it can be considered such, was incidental to this method of preaching.”
As the Supreme Court of Wyoming said in the Martin case: “There is an extraordinary diversity of opinion among the courts as to the validity” of Green River ordinances as applied to religious solicitors.
Green River ordinances have been used at times to try to prevent door-to-door selling of religious literature. But most city governments have recognized the right of the church to propagate the gospel by this method. The church is opposed to such ordinances when they are applied to the selling of religious literature, holding that it violates the First Amendment guarantee of the free exercise of religion, a part of which is the preaching of the gospel through means of selling the printed page.
The Breard case noted that First Amendment protection does not extend “to colporteurs offending . . . state trespass laws by distributing, after notice to desist, like publications to the tenants in a private apartment house.”