The name Green River Ordinance is given to a common United States city ordinance prohibiting door-to-door solicitation. Under such an ordinance, it is illegal for any business to sell their items door-to-door without express permission from the household beforehand. Some versions prohibit all organizations, including non-profit charitable, political, and religious groups, from soliciting or canvassing any household that makes it clear, in writing, that it does not want such solicitations (generally with a "No Trespassing" or "No Solicitations" sign posted.)
The ordinance is named for the city of Green River, Wyoming, which in 1931 was the first city to enact it. The ordinance was unsuccessfully challenged on constitutional grounds by the Fuller Brush Company in 1932.
The ordinance has been challenged before the Supreme Court on several occasions.
Famous quotes containing the words green, river and/or ordinance:
“But we still remember ... above all, the cool, free aspect of the wild apple trees, generously proffering their fruit to us, though still green and crude,—the hard, round, glossy fruit, which, if not ripe, still was not poison, but New English too, brought hither, its ancestors, by ours once. These gentler trees imparted a half-civilized and twilight aspect to the otherwise barbarian land.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Other roads do some violence to Nature, and bring the traveler to stare at her, but the river steals into the scenery it traverses without intrusion, silently creating and adorning it, and is as free to come and go as the zephyr.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I fear it is the effect of this ordinance to clothe Jesus with an authority which he never claimed and which distracts the mind of the worshipper.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)