The United States Supreme Court rejected a request from a Chicago-area prosecutor to review a recent ruling that the First Amendment protects a right to record the actions of police officers as they perform their public duties.

The lower court's decision was hotly contested. A two-judge majority ruled in May that "the act of making an audio or audiovisual recording is necessarily included within the First Amendment’s guarantee of speech and press rights as a corollary of the right to disseminate the resulting recording." But Judge Richard Posner dissented. During oral arguments, he worried upholding a First Amendment right to record the police would lead to "a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers."

In his dissent, Judge Posner claimed the majority's ruling "casts a shadow over electronic privacy statutes of other states." But the majority disagreed. "The Illinois eavesdropping statute obliterates the distinction between private and nonprivate by criminalizing all nonconsensual audio recording regardless of whether the communication is private in any sense," the other two judges ruled. They suggested laws that only limited recording in private settings stood a better chance of passing muster under the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court's decision to let the Seventh Circuit's ruling stand is a victory for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, which spearheaded the case. The ACLU's chapter in Massachusetts also had success vindicating a First Amendment right to record the actions of public officials. The First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled police violated the rights of a Boston man when they arrested him for using his cell phone to record the arrest of a suspect. In March, the city agreed to pay $170,000 to settle his civil rights lawsuit.