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Reno V. ACLU
''Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union'', 521 U.S. 844 (1997), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, unanimously ruling that anti-indecency provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.. This was the first major Supreme Court ruling on the regulation of materials distributed via the Internet. Background and procedural history The Communications Decency Act (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 argued that certain parts of the act were facially unconstitutional and sought a preliminary injunc ...
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Janet Reno
Janet Wood Reno (July 21, 1938 – November 7, 2016) was an American lawyer and public official who served as the 78th United States Attorney General, United States attorney general from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Reno was the second-longest serving attorney general, behind only William Wirt (Attorney General), William Wirt, and the first female to serve in the position. Reno was born and raised in Miami, Florida. After leaving to attend Cornell University and Harvard Law School, she returned to Miami where she started her career at private law firms. Her first foray into government was as a staff member for the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives. She then worked for the Dade County State Attorney's Office before returning to private practice. She was elected to the Office of State Attorney five times and was the first woman to serve as a state attorney in Florida. Pres ...
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Radio Station
Radio broadcasting is the broadcasting 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 station, while in '' satellite radio'' the radio waves are broadcast by a satellite in Earth orbit. To receive the content the listener must have a broadcast radio receiver (''radio''). Stations are often affiliated with a radio network that provides content in a common radio format, either in broadcast syndication or simulcast, or both. The encoding of a radio broadcast depends on whether it uses an analog or digital signal. Analog radio broadcasts use one of two types of radio wave modulation: amplitude modulation for AM radio, or frequency modulation for FM radio. Newer, digital radio stations transmit in several different digital audio standards, such as DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting), HD radio, or DRM ( Digital Ra ...
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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, along others such as preventing minors from hacking other systems. Background Both of Congress's earlier attempts at restricting indecent Internet content, the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act, were held to be unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment to the United States Constitution, First Amendment grounds. CIPA represented a change in strategy by Congress. While the federal government had no means of directly controlling local School district, school and library boards, many schools and libraries took advantage of Universal Service Fund (USF) discounts derived from universal service fees paid by users in order to purchase eligible telecom services and Internet access. In passing CIPA, Congress required libraries and K-12 schools using these ...
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Child Online Protection Act
The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was a United States law, law in the United States, United States of America, passed in 1998 with the declared purpose of restricting access by Minor (law)#United States, 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 United States Supreme Court, Supreme Court in 1997 (''Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, Reno v. ACLU''); COPA was a direct response to that decision, narrowing the range of material covered. COPA only limits commercial speech and only affects providers based within the United States. COPA required all commercial distributors of "material harmful to minors" to re ...
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Chris Hansen (attorney)
Christopher A. Hansen is an American civil rights attorney, notable for litigating many cases while at the ACLU, including the '' AMP v. Myriad Genetics'' (2013) case at the US Supreme Court and the ACLU's efforts in '' ACLU v. Reno'' (1997). Hansen was at the ACLU for 40 years, from 1973 to 2013, retiring as Senior National Staff Counsel, and the ACLU's longest-serving attorney. Hansen graduated from Carleton College in 1969 and earned his J.D. degree from the University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic .... He joined the ACLU in 1973, working with its newly founded Mental Health Law Project. Notable cases litigated * '' ACLU v. Reno'' (1997) * ''NYSARC v. Carey'', 393 F.Supp. 715 (EDNY 1975) (the Willowbrook case) * '' ACLU v. Miller'' (N.D. Georgia ...
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William Rehnquist
William Hubbs Rehnquist (October 1, 1924 – September 3, 2005) was an American attorney who served as the 16th chief justice of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2005, having previously been an associate justice from 1972 to 1986. Considered a staunch conservative, Rehnquist favored a conception of federalism that emphasized the Tenth Amendment's reservation of powers to the states. Under this view of federalism, the Court, for the first time since the 1930s, struck down an act of Congress as exceeding its power under the Commerce Clause. Rehnquist grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and served in the U.S. Army Air Forces from 1943 to 1946. Afterward, he studied political science at Stanford University and Harvard University, then attended Stanford Law School, where he was an editor of the '' Stanford Law Review'' and graduated first in his class. Rehnquist clerked for Justice Robert H. Jackson during the Supreme Court's 1952–1953 term, then entered private pra ...
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Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor (March 26, 1930 – December 1, 2023) was an American attorney, politician, and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan, O'Connor was the first woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. A moderate conservative, she was considered a swing vote. Before O'Connor's tenure on the Court, she was an Arizona state judge and earlier an elected legislator in Arizona, serving as the first female majority leader of a state senate as the Republican leader in the Arizona Senate. Upon her nomination to the Court, O'Connor was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate. O'Connor usually sided with the Court's conservative bloc but on occasion sided with the Court's liberal members. She often wrote concurring opinions that sought to limit the reach of the majority holding. Her majority opinions in landmark cases include '' Grutter v. Bollinger'' and '' Hamd ...
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Internet Service Provider
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned. Internet services typically provided by ISPs can include internet access, internet transit, domain name registration, web hosting, and colocation. History The Internet (originally ARPAnet) was developed as a network between government research laboratories and participating departments of universities. Other companies and organizations joined by direct connection to the backbone, or by arrangements through other connected companies, sometimes using dialup tools such as UUCP. By the late 1980s, a process was set in place towards public, commercial use of the Internet. Some restrictions were removed by 1991, shortly after the introduction of the World Wide Web. During the 1980s, online s ...
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Section 230
In the United States, Section 230 is a section of the Communications Act of 1934 that was enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which is Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and generally provides immunity for online computer services with respect to third-party content generated by its users. At its core, Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by third-party users: Section 230(c)(2) further provides "Good Samaritan" protection from civil liability for operators of interactive computer services in the voluntary good faith removal or moderation of third-party material the operator "considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." Section 230 was developed in response to a pair of lawsuits against online discussion platfo ...
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Safe Harbor (law)
A safe harbor is a provision of a statute or a regulation that specifies that certain conduct will be deemed not to violate a given rule. It is usually found in connection with a more-vague, overall standard. By contrast, "''un''safe harbors" describe conduct that ''will'' be deemed to violate the rule. For example, in the context of a statute that requires drivers to "not drive recklessly", a clause specifying that "driving under 25 miles per hour will be conclusively deemed not to constitute reckless driving" is a "safe harbor". Likewise, a clause saying that "driving over 90 miles per hour will be conclusively deemed to constitute reckless driving" would be an "unsafe harbor". In this example, driving between 25 miles per hour and 90 miles per hour would fall outside of either a safe harbor or an unsafe harbor, and would thus be left to be judged according to the vague "reckless" standard. Theoretical justifications Safe harbors have been promoted by legal writers as redu ...
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Overbreadth
In American jurisprudence, the overbreadth doctrine is primarily concerned with facial challenges to laws under the First Amendment. Definition The overbreadth doctrine is used to find statutes that address a first amendment freedom unconstitutional when, by its plain language, the statute hinders expression.16 C.J.S. Constitutional Law § 169 Overbreadth challenges allow a third party, who was not directly harmed by the broad sweep of the statute, to challenge its constitutionality even when his or her own rights are not violated. Thus, a statute that has regulated an individual's expression as allowed by the constitution's protections (i.e. an individual's ''un''protected speech is appropriately found to have violated a statute) can nonetheless be challenged by that individual on a claim that it also applies to substantial instances of protected expression. This serves to check statutes that would cause individuals to censor their own expressions for risk of breaking the law a ...
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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-oldest justice in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court and the third-List of United States Supreme Court justices by time in office, longest-serving justice. At the time of his death in 2019 at age 99, he was the longest-lived Supreme Court justice ever. His long tenure saw him write for the Court on most issues of American law, including civil liberties, the Capital punishment in the United States, death penalty, government action, and intellectual property. Despite being a registered Republican Party (United States), Republican who throughout his life identified as a conservative, Stevens was considered to have been on the liberal side of the Court at the time of his retirement. Born in Chicago, Stevens served in the United States Navy durin ...
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