have First Amendment rights, suggesting that the question whether public entities are ever protected by the First Amendment also remains open.  See City of Madison Joint Sch.  Dist.  No. 8 v.  Wisc.  Employment Relations Comm’n, 429 U.S. 167, 175 n.7 (1976) ("We need not decide whether a municipal corporation as an employer has First Amendment rights to hear the views of its citizens and employees.").  Several courts of appeals have cited Justice Stewart’s concurrence in Columbia Broadcasting Systems and have, with little discussion or analysis, concluded that a “government . . . speaker is not itself protected by the first amendment.”  Warner Cable Communications, Inc. v.  City of Niceville, 911 F.2d 634, 638 (11th Cir. 1990); see also NAACP v.  Hunt, 891 F.2d 1555, 1565 (11th Cir. 1990) ("[T]he First Amendment protects citizens’ speech only from government regulation; government speech itself is not protected by the First Amendment."); Student Gov’t Ass’n v.  Bd. of Trustees of the Univ. of Mass., 868 F.2d 473, 481 (1st Cir. 1989) (concluding that the legal services organization run by a state university, “as a state entity, itself has no First Amendment rights"); Estiverne v.  La.  State Bar Ass’n, 863 F.2d 371, 379 (5th Cir. 1989) (noting that “the first amendment does not protect government speech").  We do not think that the question whether public libraries are protected by the First Amendment can be resolved as simply as these cases suggest.  This difficulty is demonstrated by the reasoning of the Seventh Circuit in a case in which that court considered whether municipalities are protected by the First Amendment and noted that it is an open question that could plausibly be answered in the affirmative, yet declined to decide it: 

Only a few cases address the question whether municipalities or other state subdivisions or agencies have any First Amendment rights. . . .  The question is an open one in this circuit, and we do not consider the answer completely free from doubt.  For many purposes, for example diversity jurisdiction and Fourteenth Amendment liability, municipalities are treated by the law as if they were persons.  Monell v.  Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658, 690 (1978); Moor v.  County of Alameda, 411 U.S. 693, 717-18 (1973).  There is at least an argument that the marketplace of ideas would be unduly curtailed if municipalities could not freely express themselves on matters of public concern, including the subsidization of housing and the demographic makeup of the community.  To the extent, moreover, that a municipality is the voice of its residents—is, indeed, a megaphone amplifying voices that might not otherwise be audible—a curtailment of its right to speak might be thought a curtailment of the unquestioned First Amendment rights of those residents.  See Meir Dan-Cohen, “Freedoms of Collective Speech:  A Theory of Protected Communications by Organizations, Communities, and the State,” 79 Calif.  L. Rev. 1229, 1261-63 (1991); cf.