Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union

Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 19, 1997 Decided June 26, 1997
Full case name	Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States, et al. v. American Civil Liberties Union, et al.
Docket nos.	96-511
Citations	521 U.S. 844 (more) 117 S.Ct. 2329, 2334; 138 L.Ed.2d 874
Prior history	Prelim. injunction granted (3-judge court, E.D. Penn. 1996); expedited review by S.Ct. per CDA §561
Holding
§223(a)(1)(B), §223(a)(2), §223(d) of the CDA are unconstitutional and unenforceable, except for cases of obscenity or child pornography, because they abridge the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment and are substantially overbroad. The Internet is entitled to the full protection given to media like the print press; the special factors justifying government regulation of broadcast media do not apply.
Court membership
Case opinions
Majority	Stevens, joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer
Concur/dissent	O'Connor, joined by Rehnquist
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. I; 47 U.S.C. § 223

Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), is a United States Supreme Court case in which all nine Justices of the Court voted to strike down anti-indecency provisions of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), because they violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. Two Justices concurred in part and dissented in part to the decision. This was the first major Supreme Court ruling on the regulation of materials distributed via the Internet.

The Communications Decency Act was an attempt to protect minors from explicit material on the Internet by criminalizing the knowing transmission of "obscene or indecent" messages to any recipient under 18; and also the knowing sending to a person under 18 of anything "that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs." The ACLU argued that certain parts of the act were facially unconstitutional and sought a preliminary injunction preventing the government from enforcing those provisions. Section 561 of the act required that any facial challenges be heard by a panel of three district judges; that panel granted the injunction. Because the act also permitted appeals to be heard directly by the Supreme Court, the Court affirmed the panel's judgment without the usual intermediate appellate decision.

The government's main defense of the CDA was that similar decency laws had been upheld in three prior Supreme Court decisions: Ginsberg v. New York (1968); F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation (1978); and Renton v. Playtime Theatres, Inc. (1986); and that the CDA should be similarly upheld. In Ginsberg v. New York, the Supreme Court ruled that material that is not obscene may nonetheless be harmful for children, and its marketing may be regulated. In F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, the Supreme Court had upheld the possibility of the FCC delivering administrative sanctions to a radio station for broadcasting George Carlin's monologue on "Filthy Words". In Reno v. ACLU, though, the Supreme Court held that this was not case law justifying the CDA, as the FCC's sanctions were not criminal punishments; and TV and radio broadcasts, "as a matter of history, had 'received the most limited First Amendment protection'…in large part because warnings could not adequately protect the listener from unexpected program content", as opposed to Internet users, who must take "a series of affirmative steps" to access explicit material. Finally, in Renton v. Playtime Theatres, Inc., the Supreme Court had upheld a zoning ordinance that kept adult movie theaters out of residential neighborhoods. The government argued that the CDA was an attempt to institute "a sort of 'cyberzoning' on the Internet". In Reno v. ACLU, however, the Court ruled that the "time, place, and manner regulation" that Renton had enacted was not similar to the CDA, which was "a content-based blanket restriction on speech".