''Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union'', 521 U.S. 844 (1997), was a
landmark decision
Landmark court decisions, in present-day common law legal systems, establish precedents that determine a significant new legal principle or concept, or otherwise substantially affect the interpretation of existing law. "Leading case" is commonly u ...
of the
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
, unanimously ruling that
anti-indecency provisions of the 1996
Communications Decency Act
The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) was the United States Congress's first notable attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In the 1997 landmark case ''Reno v. ACLU'', the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck ...
violated the
First Amendment
First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1).
First or 1st may also refer to:
*World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement
Arts and media Music
* 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...
's guarantee of
freedom of speech
Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recogni ...
.
[.] This was the first major Supreme Court ruling on the regulation of materials distributed via the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
.
Background and procedural history
The
Communications Decency Act
The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) was the United States Congress's first notable attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In the 1997 landmark case ''Reno v. ACLU'', the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck ...
(CDA) 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 knowingly sending to a person under 18 anything "that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs." The
American Civil Liberties Union
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...
argued that certain parts of the act were
facially unconstitutional and sought a preliminary
injunction
An injunction is a legal and equitable remedy in the form of a special court order that compels a party to do or refrain from specific acts. ("The court of appeals ... has exclusive jurisdiction to enjoin, set aside, suspend (in whole or in pa ...
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, that court took the case 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
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdictio ...
delivering administrative sanctions to a radio station
Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radio ...
for broadcasting George Carlin
George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008) was an American comedian, actor, author, and social critic. Regarded as one of the most important and influential stand-up comedians of all time, he was dubbed "the dean of countercul ...
's "Seven Dirty Words
The seven dirty words are seven English-language curse words that American comedian George Carlin first listed in his 1972 "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" monologue. The words, in the order Carlin listed them, are: "shit", "piss", " ...
" comedy routine.[
In ''Reno v. ACLU'', though, the Supreme Court held that this was not ]case law
Case law, also used interchangeably with common law, is law that is based on precedents, that is the judicial decisions from previous cases, rather than law based on constitutions, statutes, or regulations. Case law uses the detailed facts of a l ...
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 did not correspond with the CDA, which was "a content-based blanket restriction on speech".
]
Opinion of the Court
In a nuanced decision, Justice John Paul Stevens
John Paul Stevens (April 20, 1920 – July 16, 2019) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1975 to 2010. At the time of his retirement, he was the second-oldes ...
wrote of the differences between Internet communication and previous types of communication that the Court had ruled on. In conclusion, he wrote:
We are persuaded that the CDA lacks the precision that the First Amendment requires when a statute regulates the content of speech. In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve. ... It is true that we have repeatedly recognized the governmental interest in protecting children from harmful materials. But that interest does not justify an unnecessarily broad suppression of speech addressed to adults. As we have explained, the Government may not "reduc the adult population ... to ... only what is fit for children."
The rest of the CDA, including the " safe harbor" provision in Section 230
Section 230 is a section of Title 47 of the United States Code that was enacted as part of the United States Communications Decency Act and generally provides immunity for website platforms with respect to third-party content. At its core, Sect ...
protecting Internet service provider
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...
s from being liable for the words of others, was not affected by this decision and remains law.
Concurring opinion
Justice O'Connor, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, agreed with the decision "as of 1997" but expressed interest in the idea of creating an "adult zone" on the Internet that was made inaccessible to minors through "gateway technology" that had been investigated by a lower district court. If such technology could be introduced, they wrote, zoning portions of the Internet to prohibit adult content could be as constitutional as such zoning is in the physical world.
The two dissented in part, writing they would have invalidated a narrower portion of the two CDA provisions under review.
See also
* Chris Hansen
Christopher Edward Hansen (born September 13, 1959) is an American television journalist and YouTube personality. He is known for his work on ''Dateline NBC'', in particular the former segment ''To Catch a Predator'', which revolved around catc ...
, ACLU litigator who organized the case
* Communications Decency Act
The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) was the United States Congress's first notable attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In the 1997 landmark case ''Reno v. ACLU'', the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck ...
, the 1996 Act invalidated by ''Reno v. ACLU''
* Child Online Protection Act
The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was a law in the United States of America, passed in 1998 with the declared purpose of restricting access by minors to any material defined as harmful to such minors on the Internet. The law, however, never ...
, successor legislation, also invalidated
* Children's Internet Protection Act
The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is one of a number of bills that the United States Congress proposed to limit children's exposure to pornography and explicit content online.
Background
Both of Congress's earlier attempts at restri ...
, successor legislation, ultimately upheld
Further reading
*
*
*
*
External links
*
First Amendment Library entry on ''Reno v. ACLU''
*Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold (born 1947) is an American critic, writer, and teacher, known for his specialties on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a t ...
'
testimony as an expert witness
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reno V. American Civil Liberties Union
United States obscenity case law
United States Internet case law
1997 in United States case law
American Civil Liberties Union litigation
United States Supreme Court cases
United States Supreme Court cases of the Rehnquist Court
Communications Decency Act