Mark Roote v. Kershaw County, South Carolina, et al.

Whether a court may uphold, as a matter of law, the enforcement of a speaking restriction against a citizen at a public meeting—and the citizen’s resulting removal and arrest—on the basis of an ordinance enacted three months after the arrest, where the ordinance actually in effect imposed no such restriction.

Whether a court may reject a claim that a speaking restriction was selectively enforced by demanding a comparator who violated the restriction in the same way as the plaintiff, where it is undisputed that four of the seven speakers who preceded the plaintiff exceeded the restriction without consequence and the sheriff testified that exceeding it was “not out of the ordinaiy.”

Whether, at summary judgment, a court may resolve the causation element of a First Amendment retaliatory-arrest claim against the plaintiff by crediting the government’s alternative explanations, where the arrest was announced immediately after the plaintiffs protected criticism of officials and both the arresting officer and the county administrator testified they had not intended to arrest him before that moment.