Supreme Court Strikes Down Another Attempt by Congress to Restrict Free Speech

Case: Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition

April 16, 2002 12:00 am

NEW YORK–The U.S. Supreme Court today struck down Congress’s attempt to expand the definition of child pornography, saying that the law “prohibits speech despite its serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value,” a ruling the American Civil Liberties Union today hailed as a forceful defense of First Amendment principles.

The 6-3 majority opinion, authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, “sends a message that Congress may not overstep the boundaries the Court laid out in distinguishing constitutionally protected speech from obscenity and child pornography that harms actual children,” said Ann Beeson, a staff attorney with the ACLU, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case together with its Northern California office.

The Child Pornography Protection Act barred sexually explicit material that depicts what “appear(s) to be a minor”‘ or that is advertised in a way that “conveys the impression” that a minor was involved in its creation. Such depictions, the Court today recognized, could include scenes from Academy Award-winning films like Traffic and American Beauty.

The criminal law could also be applied to “a picture in a psychology manual, as well as a movie depicting the horrors of sexual abuse,” the Court wrote, the kind of material used by the ACLU’s clients, which include the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, the Society for Professional Journalists and the Radio and Television News Directors Association.

U.S. Supreme Court

Privacy & Technology

Free Speech

Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition

Status: Closed (Judgment)

Major League Baseball will celebrate the 71st anniversary of Jackie Robinson Day, which marks the day Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947

On April 10th, Jackie Robinson became the first Black Major League player in baseball. Robinson began his career with the Brooklyn Dodgers

The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first American society dedicated to the cause of abolition, is founded in Philadelphia on April 14, 1775. The society changes its name to the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in 1784.

Leading Quaker educator and abolitionist Anthony Benezet called the society together two years after he persuaded the Quakers to create the Negro School at Philadelphia. Benezet was born in France to a Huguenot (French Protestant) family that had fled to London in order to avoid persecution at the hands of French Catholics. The family eventually migrated to Philadelphia when Benezet was 17. There, he joined the Society of Friends (Quakers) and began a career as an educator. In 1750, Benezet began teaching slave children in his home after regular school hours, and in 1754, established the first girls’ school in America. With the help of fellow Quaker John Woolman, Benezet persuaded the Philadelphia Quaker Yearly Meeting to take an official stance against slavery in 1758.

source: history.com

1775 – The first abolitionist society in U.S. was organized in Philadelphia with Ben Franklin as president.

1793 – A royalist rebellion in Santo Domingo was crushed by French republican troops.

1828 – The first edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary was published under the name “American Dictionary of the English Language.”

1860 – The first Pony Express rider arrived in San Francisco with mail originating in St. Joseph, MO.

1865 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth. He actually died early the next morning.

1889 – The first international Conference of American States began in Washington, DC.

1894 – First public showing of Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope took place.

1902 – James Cash (J.C.) Penney opened his first retail store in Kemmerer, WY. It was called the Golden Rule Store.

1910 – U.S. President William Howard Taft threw out the first ball for the Washington Senators and the Philadelphia Athletics.

1912 – The Atlantic passenger liner Titanic, on its maiden voyage hit an iceberg and began to sink. 1,517 people lost their lives and more than 700 survived.

1918 – The U.S. First Aero Squadron engaged in America’s first aerial dogfight with enemy aircraft over Toul, France.

1925 – WGN became the first radio station to broadcast a regular season major league baseball game. The Cubs beat the Pirates 8-2.

1931 – King Alfonso XIII of Spain went into exile and the Spanish Republic was proclaimed.

1939 – The John Steinbeck novel “The Grapes of Wrath” was first published.

1946 – The civil war between Communists and nationalist resumed in China.

1953 – Viet Minh invaded Laos with 40,00 troops.

1956 – Ampex Corporation of Redwood City, CA, demonstrated the first commercial magnetic tape recorder for sound and picture.

1959 – The Taft Memorial Bell Tower was dedicated in Washington, DC.

1969 – For the first time, a major league baseball game was played in Montreal, Canada.

1981 – America’s first space shuttle, Columbia, returned to Earth after a three-day test flight. The shuttle orbited the Earth 36 times during the mission.

1984 – The Texas Board of Education began requiring that the state’s public school textbooks describe the evolution of human beings as “theory rather than fact”.

1985 – The Russian paper “Pravda” called U.S. President Reagan‘s planned visit to Bitburg to visit the Nazi cemetery an “act of blasphemy”.

1986 – U.S. President Reagan announced the U.S. air raid on military and terrorist related targets in Libya.

1987 – Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed banning all missiles from Europe.

1988 – Representatives from the U.S.S.R., Pakistan, Afghanistan and the U.S. signed an agreement that called for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan starting on May 15. The last Soviet troop left Afghanistan on February 15, 1989.

1988 – In New York, real estate tycoons Harry and Leona Helmsley were indicted for income tax evasion.

1990 – Cal Ripken of the Baltimore Orioles began a streak of 95 errorless games and 431 total chances by a shortstop.

1994 – Two American F-15 warplanes inadvertently shot down two U.S. helicopters over northern Iraq. 26 people were killed including 15 Americans.

1998 – The state of Virginia ignored the requests from the World Court and executed a Paraguayan for the murder of a U.S. woman.

1999 – Pakistan test-fired a ballistic missile that was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching its rival neighbor India.

2000 – After five years of deadlock, Russia approved the START II treaty that calls for the scrapping of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads. The Russian government warned it would abandon all arms-control pacts if Washington continued with an anti-missile system.

2002 – U.S. President George W. Bush sent a letter of congratulations to JCPenny’s associates for being in business for 100 years. James Cash (J.C.) Penney had opened his first retail store on April 14, 1902.

2002 – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returned to office two days after being arrested by his country’s military.

2008 – Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines announced they were combining.

Source:

on-this-day.com

Noah Webster, a Yale-educated lawyer with an avid interest in language and education, publishes his American Dictionary of the English Language on April 14, 1828.

Webster’s dictionary was one of the first lexicons to include distinctly American words. The dictionary, which took him more than two decades to complete, introduced more than 10,000 “Americanisms.” The introduction of a standard American dictionary helped standardize English spelling, a process that had started as early as 1473, when printer William Caxton published the first book printed in English. The rapid proliferation of printing and the development of dictionaries resulted in increasingly standardized spellings by the mid-17th century. Coincidentally, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published almost exactly 63 years earlier, on April 15, 1755.

Webster’s dictionary was one of the first lexicons to include distinctly American words. The dictionary, which took him more than two decades to complete, introduced more than 10,000 “Americanisms.” The introduction of a standard American dictionary helped standardize English spelling, a process that had started as early as 1473, when printer William Caxton published the first book printed in English. The rapid proliferation of printing and the development of dictionaries resulted in increasingly standardized spellings by the mid-17th century. Coincidentally, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published almost exactly 63 years earlier, on April 15, 1755.

Webster’s dictionary was one of the first lexicons to include distinctly American words. The dictionary, which took him more than two decades to complete, introduced more than 10,000 “Americanisms.” The introduction of a standard American dictionary helped standardize English spelling, a process that had started as early as 1473, when printer William Caxton published the first book printed in English. The rapid proliferation of printing and the development of dictionaries resulted in increasingly standardized spellings by the mid-17th century. Coincidentally, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published almost exactly 63 years earlier, on April 15, 1755.

Source: history.com