## Facts

- Congress enacted the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), 47 U.S.C. § 231, to restrict, for commercial purposes, Web content deemed “harmful to minors.”
- COPA incorporated the Miller obscenity framework and required application of “contemporary community standards” to assess harmfulness to minors.
- The ACLU and other organizations and Web publishers filed a pre-enforcement facial challenge, alleging COPA restricted protected speech and failed First Amendment strict scrutiny.
- The district court issued a preliminary injunction barring enforcement.
- The Third Circuit affirmed the injunction, holding COPA substantially overbroad because Web publishers would have to comply with the standards of the most restrictive communities.
- The Supreme Court granted certiorari to review whether the community-standards feature, by itself, rendered COPA facially unconstitutional.

## Issues

1. Whether COPA’s reliance on “contemporary community standards” to define material “harmful to minors” on the World Wide Web, by itself, makes the statute substantially overbroad under the First Amendment.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court vacated the Third Circuit’s judgment and remanded.
- The Court held that COPA’s use of “contemporary community standards,” standing alone, does not render the statute substantially overbroad.
- The Court limited its ruling to the community-standards rationale and left other constitutional questions for further proceedings.

## Legal Principles

- A statute regulating sexually explicit material may incorporate “contemporary community standards” consistent with established obscenity doctrine.
- The nationwide accessibility of Web content does not, by itself, make a community-standards approach facially invalid.
- In a facial overbreadth analysis, a court cannot invalidate a law solely because one statutory feature might have broad practical effects; the court must assess whether that feature alone compels substantial overbreadth.
- A determination that one rationale for invalidation is insufficient does not resolve whether the law is narrowly tailored or the least restrictive means under strict scrutiny.

## Conclusion

The Court rejected the view that COPA was facially unconstitutional solely because it required juries to apply contemporary community standards, vacated the Third Circuit’s overbreadth ruling, and remanded for consideration of COPA’s remaining First Amendment defects.


Ashcroft v. Am. Civil Liberties Union, 535 U.S. 564 (2002)