Hunting Law Challenge Refused

The Supreme Court refused Monday to hear a constitutional challenge to a Montana law that makes it a crime to interfere with hunting.

In several states, the hunter harassment laws have come under constitutional attack as interfering with the free speech rights of antihunting advocates to go into the field to try to stop hunters.

The crime bill that passed Congress last summer added a hunter harassment provision to the federal criminal code.

The Montana case, brought by the Fund for Animals, a wildlife protection group, is an appeal on behalf of a man who tried to stop a statesupervised bison hunt outside Yellowstone National Park in 1990.

The man, John Lilburn, was one of a group of protesters who stood between hunters and bison and urged the hunters not to shoot. He was convicted of violating a 1987 state law that provides: “No person may disturb an individual engaged in the lawful taking of an animal with the intent to dissuade the individual or otherwise prevent the taking of the animal.”

A lower state court, concluding that the law “encompasses all verbal and expressive conduct which has the intention to dissuade from hunting,” agreed with Lilburn that the statute was unconstitutional. The state supreme court disagreed, upholding the law on the ground that it served the state’s legitimate interest in avoiding confrontation in the field.