EVENDALE, Ohio — Attorney Lou Sirkin is best known for his high-profile clients, such as Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and Jerry Springer, who resigned from city council in 1974 after a prostitution scandal and later became Cincinnati’s mayor.
One of the nation’s experts on the First Amendment, Sirkin's work goes back decades. He successfully defended the director of the Contemporary Arts Center in 1990 against obscenity charges.
Sirkin, who is at the Cincinnati firm Santen & Hughes, typically represents protesters. Such as the hundreds who were arrested after curfew during local Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020.
His newest client is the Village of Evendale, which gained national attention for an unexpected neo-Nazi protest on a highway overpass in February.
“Public sidewalks are public forums,” Sirkin said. “We may not like their speech, and it may be very, very offensive, but … that’s the First Amendment, the right of assembly and the right of free speech.”
But protests nowadays look very different than they did decades ago. They are moving out of urban areas and into small villages where law enforcement may not have the training to handle them.
“Now people are openly coming to demonstrations armed. The confrontation and the togetherness of the First Amendment and the Second Amendment and the dangers,” Sirkin said. “If you have a gun on you and you get threatened, you’re liable to pull the gun out right away.”
Sirkin is doing a complete review of Evendale’s ordinances to ensure they are up to date, clear and consistent with state and federal law. He may recommend the village update its rules on permitting for protests if they are old and don’t work in practice.
“They’ve come in anticipation that this may happen again. It may happen again, instead of it being Evendale, it may be Sharonville. It may be Woodlawn. It may be Amberly Village. It may be Indian Hill,” Sirkin said. “But how do we deal with it, so we’re uniform?”
He may also test the boundary of gun laws in Ohio. As an open carry state, protesters can carry weapons in public without a permit.
WATCH: Attorney Lou Sirkin discusses Evendale's response to the neo-Nazi protest
But some states allow cities to ban guns at large gatherings, such as demonstrations.
“Whether that will conflict with the Ohio law is a question that is open, in my mind,” Sirkin said. “That may take going to the statehouse and saying ‘hey, look for smaller villages maybe there needs to be some regulations in dealing with weapons that would be consistent.’ Are there restrictions that we can put on that may affect the Second Amendment?”
“We’re facing a kind of a different dilemma with some of the protests. It’s not just being worried about the guy throwing the rock that will break a window,” Sirkin said. “We’re talking about people that are actually going there in advance carrying weapons with them.”
Last July a neo-Nazi group protested in Nashville. That prompted lawmakers there to pass six different measures to curb their rhetoric and public displays.
In Nashville, they did several things — prohibited the placement of signs on highway overpasses, revised the policy surrounding wearing masks and created buffer zones around public spaces for demonstrations.
Soon after the Evendale neo-Nazi protest, Hamilton County Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey called on Ohio lawmakers to create stricter laws. She wants state lawmakers to implement harsher laws for "hate speech" and to make it a crime to wear a mask while carrying a firearm for purposes of intimidation.
“People really spoke up in Evendale when this occurred,” Sirkin said. “Those guys that came up here were only planning to stay an hour. I think they only stayed for about 30 minutes tops, because people really exercised that marketplace and came out there and outshouted them and they left. And there was something good about that, but on the other hand, people were very frightened and concerned about it.”
Sirkin also praised law enforcement for the way they handled the protest in Evendale.
“The officers that were involved from Evendale and even from the sheriff’s department, did what I think is so important to do,” Sirkin said. “They listened to both sides, they were in the middle of both sides, and those officers had the communication skills to be able to do that.”
Evendale officials also hired an independent team to both review police actions during the protest and make recommendations. The department hired 21CP Solutions, a consulting firm led by former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey.
“Let’s train people. Let’s have policies that make it to where the communities are required to have their officers trained to be able to accept that tolerance,” Sirkin said.
That report is not yet finished but will be released to the public when it is.
“I think communities throughout the state and everywhere should be looking at their ordinances,” Sirkin said. “We are in a really sensitive time right now. And I’m not being political with it but we’re being bombarded with a lot of speech that as a parent I wouldn’t tolerate from my child.”
