United States v. Michael Williams (553 U.S. 285)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided May 19, 2008 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 553 U.S. 285 · 128 S. Ct. 1830
- Decided
- May 19, 2008
- Term
- October Term 2007
- Vote
- 7–2
- Majority author
- Justice Scalia
- Issue area
- First Amendment
- Disposition
- Reversed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court. Section 2252A(a)(3)(B) of Title 18, United States Code, criminalizes, in certain specified circumstances, the pandering or solicitation of child pornography. This case presents the question whether that statute is overbroad under the First Amendment or impermissibly vague under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. I A We have long held that obscene speech — sexually explicit material that violates fundamental notions of decency — is not protected by the First Amendment. See Roth v. United States, 354 U. S. 476,484-485 (1957). But to protect explicit material that has social value, we have limited the scope of the obscenity exception, and have overturned convictions for the distribution of sexually graphic but nonobscene material. See Miller v. California, 413 U. S. 15, 23-24 (1973); see also, e. g., Jenkins v. Georgia, 418 U. S. 153, 161 (1974). Over the last 25 years, we have confronted a related and overlapping category of proscribable speech: child pornography. See Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U. S. 234 (2002); Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U. S. 103 (1990); New York v. Ferber, 458 U. S. 747 (1982). This consists of sexually explicit visual portrayals that feature children. We have held that a statute which proscribes the distribution of all child pornography, even material that does not qualify as obscenity,…
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