Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union
The Court ruled that a federal law restricting commercial websites from showing minors material 'harmful' to them is not automatically unconstitutional just because it relies on community standards that vary from place to place.
The decision reverses a lower court's reasoning that had blocked the law entirely on that single ground, but it leaves the law's enforcement on hold while other constitutional questions about the statute are worked out below.
“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 for purposes of the First Amendment.”
The Court's core, deliberately narrow holding on the community-standards question.
How it got here: A federal trial court blocked COPA with a preliminary injunction; the Third Circuit affirmed on community-standards grounds; the government asked the Supreme Court to review that single issue.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) to stop commercial websites from making sexual material available to minors, after an earlier law, the Communications Decency Act, was struck down. A coalition of website operators, bookstores, and civil liberties groups—many of which posted sexual health, art, or literary content—sued, arguing COPA would force them to hide material behind age-verification screens because of how strict-community judgments could brand it "harmful to minors."
The question before the Court
Could Congress use varying local "community standards" to decide what online material is "harmful to minors" without automatically violating free speech rights?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that COPA's use of varying local community standards does not, by itself, make the law unconstitutionally overbroad. Because COPA borrows the Miller obscenity test's narrowing requirements—that material must appeal to the prurient interest and lack serious value for minors—the law covers much less material than the earlier, broader Communications Decency Act, and prior cases already allow national speakers to be held to different community standards in different places.
The Court stressed that this was the only question it was deciding. It did not decide whether COPA is overbroad for other reasons, whether it's too vague, or whether it can survive the stricter First Amendment test the trial court applied. Those questions were left for the lower courts, and the law remains blocked from enforcement in the meantime.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Website operators who post sexually themed content for profit remain under a cloud of possible federal liability, since the law is not dead but also not yet enforceable. The ruling means online publishers can still be judged by the standards of whichever community is most easily offended, a concern several justices flagged as a heavy burden unique to the internet.
What changes now
The case returns to the Third Circuit, which must now examine the other constitutional questions the district court raised but the appeals court skipped, including whether COPA is vague, whether its "commercial purposes" and "as a whole" provisions are overbroad, and whether it survives strict scrutiny. Until further court action, the government remains blocked from enforcing COPA. This is not COPA's final legal fate—later rounds of litigation would continue for years.
What this does not decide
The Court decided only the narrow question of whether COPA's use of community standards, standing alone, made the law overbroad. It expressly did not decide whether COPA is unconstitutionally vague, overbroad for other reasons, or able to survive the strict First Amendment scrutiny the trial court had applied.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice O'Connor
Justice O'Connor agreed that community-standard variation alone did not make COPA overbroad here, but she argued the Court should go further and adopt a national adult standard for internet obscenity, finding local geographic variation increasingly unworkable and unnecessary given the internet's nationalizing effect on public discourse.
Concurrence — Justice Breyer
Justice Breyer concurred based on his reading that Congress, per COPA's legislative history, intended 'community' to mean the nation's adult community as a whole rather than separate local standards, which he thought avoided the First Amendment problems that local variation would create.
Concurrence — Justice Kennedy
Justice Kennedy agreed only with the narrow point that community-standards variation alone cannot doom COPA, but he thought the Court could not know whether the law was substantially overbroad without first examining unresolved questions like the scope of 'commercial purposes' and what it means to judge material 'as a whole' online, and would have left that full analysis to the Court of Appeals.
Dissent — Justice Stevens
“In the context of the Internet, however, community standards become a sword, rather than a shield.”Stevens's central objection to applying local community standards on a medium with no geographic boundaries.
Justice Stevens argued that because internet speakers cannot control who accesses their material or route around any community, community standards function as a sword rather than a shield online, letting the least tolerant community suppress speech nationwide; he would have affirmed the Third Circuit and struck the law down as substantially overbroad.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the three-part Miller test for obscenity—asking whether material appeals to prurient interest, is patently offensive, and lacks serious value—as the benchmark for judging whether COPA's use of community standards was overly broad.
- It distinguished the earlier Communications Decency Act, which lacked the 'prurient interest' and 'serious value' limits and therefore swept in enormous amounts of harmless material; COPA's narrower definition meant the effect of varying community standards would be far smaller.
- Relying on Hamling v. United States and Sable Communications, two cases upholding federal statutes that required nationwide speakers (mail and phone) to comply with the strictest local obscenity standards, the Court held that requiring nationwide compliance with varying standards does not, by itself, violate the First Amendment.
- The Court rejected the argument that the internet's lack of geographic targeting makes those precedents inapplicable, reasoning that a publisher who chooses to reach every community bears the burden of meeting every community's standards, just as mail and phone distributors do.
- Because the challengers had not shown that COPA's community-standards feature alone caused substantial overbreadth—as opposed to real but modest variation—the Court concluded that this feature alone does not doom the statute.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (521 U.S. 844)
The Court found COPA narrower and less vague than the CDA struck down in Reno, so Reno's overbreadth concerns did not carry over.
Reaffirms Hamling v. United States (418 U.S. 87)
The Court relied on Hamling to hold that national speakers can be required to meet varying local obscenity standards.
Reaffirms Sable Communications of Cal., Inc. v. FCC (492 U.S. 115)
The Court relied on Sable to reject the claim that varying community standards impermissibly burden nationwide speakers.