Right to Refuse Service: Federal Law, Exceptions, and Risks

A business has the right to refuse service for legitimate, conduct-based reasons, and under a 2023 Supreme Court decision certain creative professionals can also decline specific projects that would force them to communicate a message they object to. What no business can do is turn a customer away because of who they are. Federal and state public accommodation laws still prohibit refusals based on race, color, religion, national origin, disability, and, in many states, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

Refusals That Have Always Been Legal

Most lawful refusals have nothing to do with the Supreme Court. A restaurant can turn away a customer who isn’t wearing shoes. A bar can cut off someone who is intoxicated and disruptive. A store can enforce capacity limits, require appropriate behavior, or decline to serve a person who has previously been abusive to staff. Those refusals are lawful because they target conduct, not identity.

The familiar “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone” sign does not grant unlimited authority. A sign does not override federal or state anti-discrimination law. The moment a refusal is based on a customer’s protected characteristic, it becomes illegal discrimination regardless of what any sign says.

What Federal Law Prohibits

The main federal statute is Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It guarantees all people “the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations” of businesses open to the public, without discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin.¹ Covered establishments include hotels, restaurants, gas stations, theaters, concert halls, and sports arenas.

Title II does not cover sex, disability, or sexual orientation at the federal level. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in places of public accommodation, reaching a broader set of businesses than Title II.² Most states have expanded their own public accommodation laws to include additional protected classes such as sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and marital status. State law is where many of the sharpest disputes get fought.

The Expressive-Work Exception

In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (2023), the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive content communicating messages she disagrees with.³ Lorie Smith wanted to design custom wedding websites but did not want to produce sites celebrating same-sex marriages. The majority, written by Justice Gorsuch, held that her custom work qualifies as “pure speech” because it involves original text, artwork, and design intended to celebrate and tell a couple’s unique story. Compelling her to produce that speech would be government-compelled expression, which the First Amendment generally prohibits.⁴

That ruling is narrower than it is often described. It protects the refusal of a specific message, not the refusal of a specific customer.

Refusing a Message vs. Refusing a Person

The 303 Creative majority was explicit that its decision does not create a general license to discriminate. In the Court’s framework, Smith could refuse to design a website celebrating a same-sex wedding for anyone who asked, but she could not refuse to build a dog kennel website for a same-sex couple, because that project would not involve the objectionable message.³

The theory is clean. The practice gets messy. A calligrapher who hand-letters wedding invitations could probably decline to produce invitations for a same-sex wedding, because the finished product expresses a celebratory message about a marriage she objects to. But could she also refuse to address envelopes for the same couple’s holiday cards? That work is far less expressive. The closer a service gets to routine commercial activity, the harder it becomes to claim a speech-based exemption.

Public accommodation laws continue to apply to straightforward status-based refusals. A hotel cannot turn away a guest because of their sexual orientation. A restaurant cannot refuse to seat a customer because of their religion. The 303 Creative carveout reaches only services that involve creating custom expression, and only where the objection targets the message rather than the person.

What Counts as Expressive Work

The 303 Creative opinion acknowledged that “innumerable goods and services” do not implicate the First Amendment, but it did not draw a bright line.³ Reading the Court’s reasoning, a service is more likely to be treated as expressive when:

The provider creates original, customized content using their own words, artwork, or design rather than selling an off-the-shelf product.
The finished work is intended to communicate a particular viewpoint, celebration, or narrative.
Creative judgment is central to the product, not just technical skill.

At the other end, services where speech “vanishes from the picture” remain fully subject to anti-discrimination law. A hotel room, a restaurant meal, a haircut, dry cleaning, tax preparation, medical treatment, auto repair. These involve little or no expressive content tied to a contested message, and businesses providing them cannot invoke 303 Creative to refuse customers based on protected characteristics.

The gray zone between those poles is unsettled. Wedding photography, floral arrangements, event planning, and custom printing all involve varying degrees of creative expression, and lower courts are still working through how broadly to read the 303 Creative framework.

Disability, Service Animals, and the ADA

The Americans with Disabilities Act takes a more detailed approach to refusal than the Civil Rights Act. Under ADA Title III, covered businesses include shops, gyms, doctors’ offices, private schools, day care centers, and privately operated transit services like airport shuttles, in addition to the hotels and restaurants reached by Title II.²

A business may exclude a person with a disability only when that individual poses “a significant risk to the health or safety of others that cannot be eliminated by a modification of policies, practices, or procedures or by the provision of auxiliary aids or services.”⁵ That is a deliberately high bar. Vague discomfort or speculative risk does not satisfy it. The threat must be specific, identifiable, and not solvable through reasonable adjustments.

Service animals are a frequent flashpoint. A business can only ask a customer to remove a service dog if the animal is out of control and the handler is not taking effective action, or if the animal is not housebroken. The business cannot demand documentation proving the dog is a service animal, cannot ask about the customer’s disability, and cannot charge a surcharge for the animal’s presence. If the animal is properly excluded for one of those two narrow reasons, the business must still offer the customer access to its goods and services without the animal.

Religious Organizations and Private Clubs

Both Title II and ADA Title III exempt religious organizations and genuinely private clubs. The ADA statute states that its public accommodation requirements “shall not apply to private clubs or establishments exempted from coverage under title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or to religious organizations or entities controlled by religious organizations, including places of worship.”⁶

A church, mosque, synagogue, or religiously affiliated school operating under the control of a religious body can make decisions about services and membership that a secular business cannot. A truly private club that does not hold itself open to the general public also falls outside these laws. Charging a membership fee alone does not create private-club status. A gym that anyone can join by paying dues is still a public accommodation.²

What It Costs a Business to Get This Wrong

Remedies depend on the law violated. Under Title II of the Civil Rights Act, a person denied service can file a civil action seeking injunctive relief, essentially a court order requiring the business to stop discriminating. The court can also award the winning party reasonable attorney’s fees, and the suit can be filed without the plaintiff paying court fees or posting security upfront.⁷ Where a pattern of discrimination exists, the U.S. Attorney General can intervene or bring a separate action.

ADA violations carry heavier financial consequences. The federal civil penalty for a first violation of ADA Title III public accommodation rules can reach $118,225, and a subsequent violation can cost up to $236,451.⁸ Those figures are adjusted annually for inflation and apply to penalties assessed after July 3, 2025.

State laws add another layer. Most states have their own human rights commissions or civil rights agencies that investigate complaints and can impose administrative fines, order changes to business practices, or award compensatory damages. The specifics vary by jurisdiction, but the financial exposure for a business found to have unlawfully refused service can be substantial even before litigation costs and reputational damage.

The Short Version

If a business sells routine goods or services, public accommodation law applies in full and refusals based on protected characteristics are illegal. If a business produces custom, expressive work, the owner has a First Amendment right to decline specific projects whose message they oppose, but still cannot turn away customers because of who those customers are. Conduct can be the basis for refusing service. Identity cannot.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 2000a – Prohibition Against Discrimination or Segregation in Places of Public Accommodation
2
U.S. Department of Justice – ADA.gov. Businesses That Are Open to the Public
3
Supreme Court of the United States. 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis
4
Legal Information Institute (LII) / Cornell Law School. Compelled Speech – Overview
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 US Code 12182 – Prohibition of Discrimination by Public Accommodations
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 12187 – Exemptions for Private Clubs and Religious Organizations
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 2000a-3 – Civil Actions for Injunctive Relief
8
eCFR. Part 85 – Civil Monetary Penalties Inflation Adjustment