Adult businesses Flashcards
Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc.
Young v. American Mini Theatres, 427 U.S. 50 (1976) is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a city ordinance of Detroit, Michigan requiring dispersal of adult businesses throughout the city.
Justice Stevens (writing for plurality) reasoned that the speech involved here is of lower value, and the city also has a compelling interest in protecting quality of life.
Justice Powell (concurring) disagreed with Stevens’ “lower value speech” argument, but wrote that this is only a place restriction with a limited effect on speech.
Los Angeles v. Alameda Books, Inc. (2002)
Zoning laws dictated that no adult bookstores could be within five hundred feet of a public park, or religious establishment, or within 1000 feet of another adult establishment. However, Alameda Books, Inc. and Highland Books, Inc. were two adult stores that operated under one roof.
City of Erie v. Pap’s A. M.
The court held that an ordinance banning public nudity did not violate the operator of a totally nude entertainment establishment’s constitutional right to free speech.
a public indecency ordinance that makes it a summary offense to knowingly or intentionally appear in public in a “state of nudity.”[1][3] The respondent, Pap’s, a Pennsylvania corporation, operated an establishment in Erie known as “Kandyland” that featured totally nude erotic dancing performed by women. To comply with the ordinance, these dancers would need to wear, at a minimum, pasties and a G-string.[1][3] On October 14, 1994, two days after the ordinance went into effect, Pap’s filed a complaint against the city of Erie, the mayor (Joyce Savacchio), city solicitor (Greg Karle), and members of the city council, seeking declaratory relief and a permanent injunction against the enforcement of the ordinance.[1][2]
NEA v. Finley (1998)
Court ruled that the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act, as amended in 1990, (20 U.S.C. § 954 (d)(1)), which required the Chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to ensure that “artistic excellence and artistic merit are the criteria by which [grant] applications are judged, taking into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public” was facially valid, as it neither inherently interfered with First Amendment rights nor violated constitutional vagueness principles
secondary effects doctrine
A court applies the doctrine if it finds that the regulation of speech is aimed at the ‘‘secondary effects’’ of the speech and not at the content of the speech itself.
Communication Decency Act (CDA)
the first notable attempt by the United States Congress to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In 1997, in the landmark cyberlaw case of Reno v. ACLU, the United States Supreme Court struck the anti-indecency provisions of the Act.
Title V affected the Internet (and online communications) in two significant ways. First, it attempted to regulate both indecency (when available to children) and obscenity in cyberspace. Second, Section 230 of the Act has been interpreted to say that operators of Internet services are not to be construed as publishers (and thus not legally liable for the words of third parties who use their services).
Reno v. ACLU (1997)
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;
Child Online Protection Act (COPA)
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 took effect, as three separate rounds of litigation led to a permanent injunction against the law in 2009.
The law was part of a series of efforts by US lawmakers legislating over Internet pornography. Parts of the earlier and much broader Communications Decency Act had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1997 (Reno v. ACLU); COPA was a direct response to that decision, narrowing the range of material covered.
Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA)
requires that K-12 schools and libraries in the United States use Internet filters and implement other measures to protect children from harmful online content as a condition for federal funding. It was signed into law on December 21, 2000, and was found to be constitutional by the United States Supreme Court on June 23, 2003.
jury shopping
the practice of presenting a case to several juries until a favourable decision is obtained
FCC v. Pacifica (1978
defined the power of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over indecent material as applied to broadcasting.
In 1973, a father complained to the FCC that his son had heard the George Carlin routine “Filthy Words” broadcast one afternoon over WBAI, a Pacifica Foundation FM radio station in New York City. Pacifica received censure from the FCC, in the form of a letter of reprimand, for allegedly violating FCC regulations which prohibited broadcasting indecent material.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the FCC action in 1978, by a vote of 5 to 4, ruling that the routine was “indecent but not obscene”. The Court accepted as compelling the government’s interests in:
Shielding children from potentially offensive material, and
Ensuring that unwanted speech does not enter one’s home.
The Court stated that the FCC had the authority to prohibit such broadcasts during hours when children were likely to be among the audience, and gave the FCC broad leeway to determine what constituted indecency in different contexts.
FCC v. Fox (2012)
case about whether the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s scheme for regulating speech is unconstitutionally vague.
Supreme Court ruled that because the regulations at the time did not cover “fleeting expletives” (the regulations have since been amended to that end), the fines issued were invalidated as “unconstitutionally vague” under the Due Process Clause. Because the case was resolved on that basis, the Court declined to address the First Amendment implications of the FCC’s indecency regulations or to reconsider FCC v. Pacifica,
Cruz v. Ferre (1985)
a challenge to the constitutionality of a Miami ordinance regulating the distribution of obscene and indecent material through cable television.
Hearing the case on appeal, the 11th Cir. Court held that the ordinance was facially overbroad and amounted to an ill-conceived effort suppress free expression; the language of the ordinance went beyond the Miller v. California obscenity definition and went beyond “the realm of permissible regulation” envisioned by the Supreme Court in its FCC v. Pacifica
Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011)
seeking to invalidate a newly-enacted law that imposed restrictions and labeling requirements on the sale or rental of “violent video games” to minors. The district court found in favor of the plaintiffs and prevented the enforcement of the law.
On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed, holding that: (1) violent video games did not constitute “obscenity” under the First Amendment
U.S. v. Stevens (2010)
Robert J. Stevens, an author and small-time film producer who presented himself as an authority on pit bulls, compiled and sold videotapes showing dogfights. Though he did not participate in the dogfights, he received a 37-month sentence under a 1999 federal law that banned trafficking in “depictions of animal cruelty.” [2]
ruled a federal statute criminalizing the commercial production, sale, or possession of depictions of cruelty to animals, was an unconstitutional abridgment of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
