So holds today’s Occupy Boston v. City of Boston (Mass. Super. Ct. Dec. 7, 2011) (see this Boston Herald news story): The city’s content-neutral ban on overnight sleeping in parks is consistent with the First Amendment. This seems to me to be the clearly correct result, given the Supreme Court’s decision in Clark v. CCNV (1984), which likewise upheld a ban on sleeping in parks as applied to a tent city demonstration.
This is the same result reached as to sleeping bans or overnight presence bans in the Occupy Wall Street case and the the Occupy Fresno case, which I blogged about, and in Occupy Minneapolis v. County of Hennepin (D. Minn. Nov. 23, 2011) (motion for reconsideration denied today) and Occupy Fort Myers v. City of Fort Myers (M.D. Fla. Nov. 15, 2011), which I hadn’t gotten around to blogging about. (The plaintiffs in some of these cases prevailed on other aspects of their challenges, but all their claims of a right to an exemption from the bans on sleeping or overnight presence in the park were rejected.)