Supreme Court Sends COPA Back
to Appeals Court
While partly upholding the Child Online Protection Act, the U.S. Supreme Court said May 13 that unresolved free-speech questions that were not addressed by the lower court prevent the law from taking effect now.
“The scope of our decision today is quite limited,” stressed Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the 5–4 decision. “We hold only that COPA’s reliance on community standards to identify ‘material that is harmful to minors’ does not by itself render the statute substantially overbroad,” in violation of the First Amendment.
The American Civil Liberties Union had challenged the law as unconstitutionally broad, claiming that in protecting children it also violates the rights of adults to see or buy what they want on the Internet. In sending the case back to the Third U.S. Court of Appeals, Thomas said the court would take no position on that claim. “Prudence dictates allowing the court of appeals to first examine these difficult issues,” Thomas wrote.
Passed in 1998, COPA bans commercial Web sites from allowing visitors under 18 to access material deemed harmful to minors. It has never been enforced due to injunctions and lower-court decisions won by the ACLU on behalf of 17 plaintiffs. ALA’s Freedom to Read Foundation filed an amicus brief for the plaintiffs in September 1999.
Posted May 20, 2002.
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