Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union
The Court struck down the core provisions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which made it a crime to send "indecent" or "patently offensive" material over the internet in a way minors could access, ruling that the law violated adults' First Amendment right to see and share that material.
Because there was no reliable way at the time to keep minors out while letting adults in, the law would have forced a huge amount of protected adult speech off the internet entirely, and the Court treated the internet as deserving the same strong free-speech protection as newspapers and books rather than the lighter protection given to broadcast television and radio.
“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.”
The majority's central concern that the law swept in far too much protected adult speech.
How it got here: A specially convened three-judge federal district court blocked enforcement of the law after a trial, and the government appealed directly to the Supreme Court under the Act's expedited review provisions.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, making it a crime to knowingly send "indecent" messages or display "patently offensive" material online where a minor might see it. A broad coalition of internet users, libraries, publishers, and civil liberties groups, including the ACLU and the American Library Association, sued the Attorney General, arguing the law would illegally block adults from constitutionally protected speech about topics like sex education, art, and literature.
The question before the Court
Could Congress make it a crime to send "indecent" or "patently offensive" material online where minors might see it, even though doing so would also block adults from reaching that same material?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that Congress could not ban "indecent" and "patently offensive" material from the internet in the sweeping way the Communications Decency Act attempted, because doing so would also cut off adults from a huge amount of speech they have a constitutional right to see and share. The law was a content-based restriction, and at the time there was no workable way to verify a user's age across e-mail, chat rooms, and newsgroups without shutting many speakers down entirely.
The Court distinguished earlier cases allowing more limited restrictions on obscene-to-minors material or indecent broadcasting, explaining that the internet does not intrude on unsuspecting audiences the way radio or television can and has no comparable history of government oversight. It ultimately upheld only a narrow, severable reference to obscene material, leaving the rest of the law's "indecent" and "patently offensive" restrictions unenforceable.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
The decision meant internet speakers, website operators, and online publishers could not be criminally prosecuted for posting sexually frank but non-obscene content, sparing bulletin boards, chat rooms, libraries, and advocacy sites from having to shut down or scrub content to avoid prison time, and it set the framework courts still use for evaluating internet speech laws.
What changes now
The ruling is a final decision on the merits, so the two challenged provisions cannot be enforced in the form Congress wrote them, apart from the narrow severed reference to obscene material. The decision does not disturb existing federal laws banning obscenity and child pornography online, which remain fully enforceable. Congress later attempted to address similar concerns with other statutes, some of which faced their own constitutional challenges in later cases.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Congress could ever regulate indecent internet speech in some more narrowly tailored way, and it left obscenity and child pornography laws fully intact. It also did not resolve how the ruling might apply if effective, widely available age-verification technology existed in the future.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent in part — Justice O'Connor
“The First Amendment does not tolerate such interference.”O'Connor's statement that a law reducing adults to reading only what is fit for children cannot stand.
Justice O'Connor viewed the law as an attempt to create constitutionally permissible "adult zones" on the internet, similar to zoning laws that keep minors out of certain physical spaces. She would have struck down the "display" provision entirely because current technology made it impossible to screen out only minors, but she would have upheld the "indecency transmission" and "specific person" provisions as applied to communications where the sender knows every recipient is a minor, since that narrower application does not burden adult-to-adult speech.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court treated the law as a content-based restriction on speech, which normally triggers the strictest constitutional scrutiny, and asked whether it was narrowly tailored to serve the government's admittedly legitimate goal of protecting children.
- Comparing the law to precedents allowing regulation of minors' access to sexual material, the Court found it far broader than the New York law upheld in Ginsberg v. New York because it applied even when parents consented, covered noncommercial speakers, and lacked any exception for material with serious value.
- The Court distinguished the broadcast-indecency ruling in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, explaining that radio and television have a history of pervasive government oversight and can intrude on listeners unexpectedly, while the internet requires deliberate steps to access content and had no comparable history of regulation.
- It also rejected the government's comparison to the zoning ordinance upheld in Renton v. Playtime Theatres, because that case involved zoning against the secondary effects of adult theaters, not a direct, content-based ban on the speech itself.
- Applying strict scrutiny, the Court concluded that because no reliable age-verification technology existed for most internet forums, the law would inevitably block adults from communicating with each other, not just with minors, making the restriction far broader than necessary.
- Finding the statute not readily susceptible to a narrowing construction that would fix these problems, the Court severed only the single word "indecent" from one subsection where the statute's text allowed a clean textual cut, but declined to rewrite the rest of the law.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Ginsberg v. New York (390 U.S. 629)
The Court said the CDA was far broader than the New York law upheld there, so Ginsberg did not justify the CDA.
Distinguishes FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (438 U.S. 726)
The Court found broadcasting's history of regulation and intrusiveness, present in Pacifica, absent from the internet.
Distinguishes Renton v. Playtime Theatres, Inc. (475 U.S. 41)
The Court said Renton's zoning-for-secondary-effects rationale did not apply to this direct, content-based speech ban.
Reaffirms Sable Communications of Cal., Inc. v. FCC (492 U.S. 115)
The Court relied on Sable's rule that protecting children does not justify a total ban on indecent but non-obscene speech to adults.