A class-action lawsuit seeking damages for local strippers following a 2019 Reno licensing requirement banning women under 21 from working in the city’s strip clubs remains, but some of the plaintiffs have been dismissed for lack of standing following a recent judicial decision.
A Bloomberg Law report this week indicated that “a group of dancers who challenged a Reno, Nevada regulation barring people younger than 21 from working at a club that serves alcohol fell short on some of their claims against the city.”
“The plaintiffs, who were between 18 and 21 when the suit began in 2019, challenged the city regulation on several grounds, including age discrimination, denial of due process and as a regulatory taking without just compensation,” the article went on. “Reno moved to dismiss the due process claim and for partial summary judgment on the equal protection age discrimination and regulatory takings claims.”
The local attorney who initially filed the lawsuit on behalf of eight strippers Mark Thierman remains combative and optimistic overall about the case though.
“The original decision was that the Reno regulation was unlawfully passed,” he wrote to Our Town Reno this week.
“Confining this result only to the dancers listed in the original complaint may be good politics, but it’s bad law. If the regulation was unlawful, and non-binding four years ago, and it was not changed or fixed, it’s unlawful and non-binding now. The First Amendment applies equally to all those over 18 years of age. Once the entire case is complete, we plan to appeal this ruling,” he explained.
He also went on to give his own perspectives on the meaning of this case, which initially got lots of media attention, but less so in its most recent developments.
“If the government can regulate the rights of 18- to 21-year-olds to engage in free speech, when it knows that doing so for anyone over 21 would be unconstitutional, then what prevents the government from telling anyone under 35 years of age what news they can see or hear, what video games they can play, what text they may read on the internet, or the content of what they can write in a newspaper article,” he wrote.