The Supreme Court noted that the residents of the non-Gulf neighborhoods were freely allowed to use the company-owned streets and sidewalks to access the town's businesses and facilities.

The appellant, Grace Marsh, a Jehovah's Witness, stood near the post office one day and began distributing religious literature.

The Alabama Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction by holding that the statute as applied was constitutional because the title to the sidewalk was in the corporation's name.

The question became, therefore, whether or not constitutional freedom of speech protections could be denied simply because a single company held title to the town.

Justice Reed started his dissent by noting that constitutional protections for religion, speech, and press are not absolute or unlimited in respect to the manner or the place of their exercise.

The Marsh holding at first appears somewhat narrow and inapplicable today because of the disappearance of company towns from the United States, but it was raised in a somewhat high-profile 1996 cyberlaw case, Cyber Promotions v. America Online, 948 F. Supp.

The federal district court disagreed, thereby paving the way for spam filters at the Internet service provider level.

The case has been highlighted as a potential precedent to treat online communication media like Facebook as a public space to prevent it from censoring speech.