JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Jacksonville strip-club operators and dancers are suing the city again over licensing rules for dancers the city created this year to replace old rules a federal judge said were unconstitutional.
A lawsuit filed last week argues an ordinance the City Council passed in April “continues to impose an unconstitutional prior restraint on protected speech” by giving the Sheriff’s Office too much leeway in deciding whether to issue identification cards that dancers need in order to work.
“The ordinance allows the sheriff the unfettered discretion to deny a work identification card based on his subjective determination,” says the suit filed by lawyers representing eight strip club businesses and four dancers.
Although the new ordinance repealed a requirement for dancers to be at least 21 years old, the suit also asks a judge to declare the requirement illegal, noting that part of the ordinance says “it is the council’s intent” to apply the age cutoff at some point.
The new suit, in which the company owning Wacko’s Gentleman’s Club on Emerson Street is the lead plaintiff, was reassigned Wednesday to Chief District Judge Timothy Corrigan, who handled a different suit filed in 2020.
The age requirement was a key issue in the 2020 lawsuit, filed soon after the council passed a sheath of strip-club rules that were promoted as steps to prevent human trafficking.
The new suit says the city has never made a human trafficking arrest at any strip club and says that the age rule violates dancers’ “right of occupational liberty” under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
“It prohibits performers under the age of 21 from pursuing a lawful profession while allowing all other persons under 21 to be employed by, own and patronize exactly the same businesses,” strip-club attorney Gary Edinger argues in the new suit. “That distinction is irrational.”
Corrigan ruled last year that other licensing rules there were unconstitutional but hasn't reached a conclusion on the age requirement, however.
City lawyers agreed in March to pay $60,000 and change several rules for how police inspect clubs and handle dancers violating the ordinance.
The ordinance being challenged now was introduced to the council in the same month and adopted the following month.
The suit lists several complaints that seem to center around fuzzy wording in the ordinance.
For example, the new law forbids permitting any dancer who has been convicted of “any human-trafficking-related charge,” but Edinger said those charges are never defined and “there is no statute in Florida pertaining to ‘human-trafficking-related’ crimes.”
Without some definition, he said, the rules are unconstitutional because they’re too vague to have meaning.