Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law
“Reasoning-Lite” In The Violent Video Game Case, Alan Garfield
“Reasoning-Lite” In The Violent Video Game Case, Alan Garfield
Alan E Garfield
One might have expected that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the violent video game case, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass’n, would have been a thoughtful balancing of society’s competing interests in protecting freedom of speech and protecting children from harm. After all, the Supreme Court had held decades earlier that the government could deny minors access to soft-porn, or what the Court called “girlie magazines.” So one could have assumed the Court would seriously consider California’s claim that minors also needed sheltering from the grittier world of violent video game rapes, beheadings, and ethnic cleansings. Yet, as Justice Scalia’s …
Protecting Children From Speech, Alan E. Garfield
Protecting Children From Speech, Alan E. Garfield
Alan E Garfield
Public concern about minor access to inappropriate speech (violent, sexual, vice advertising) has led to an onslaught of regulatory responses in recent years. Courts have wrestled with the constitutionality of these regulations but their decisions have provided little clarity as to what legislators may or may not do. In this Article, I guide legislators and judges through the thicket of child-protection censorship. I cut through the mass of precedent, empirical studies, and scholarship to distill the child-protection/free speech conflict into a series of comprehensible questions. By identifying the key questions underlying the conflict, I draw attention to the core constitutional …