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Hot Coffee In The Retail Space
Gamasutra has a piece talking to the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association's Hal Halpin about the impact of recent gaming news on the retail space. From the article: "As of this minute, [the game retail industry's] three major opponents are the State of California, the State of Illinois and the State of Michigan ... More specifically, they are those states' respective attorney generals and their governors, who each signed into law bills which their legislatures knew full-well would be in violation of the First Amendment."
From Wikipedia:
.", even though the text of the 1791 First Amendment states clearly that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .".
Consequently, the literal text of the First Amendment has been functionally revised through the doctrine of stare decisis, as the Court has also acknowledged. For example, in Denver v. FCC (1996), [1], the Court stated that "this Court, in different contexts, has consistently held that the Government may directly regulate speech . .
This phenomenon of functionally revising literal text has also been referred to as creating a "virtual First Amendment".
But if the literal text of the First Amendment is no longer used by the Supreme Court in rendering its decisions, what is? The text below is a brief representation of the virtual text used by the Supreme Court in its First Amendment jurisprudence over the years, from Thomas Ladanyi's book The 1987 Constitution.
Text of the Virtual First Amendment (heavily abridged)
No State legislature or the Congress of the United States shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press all media of information; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances
There is a 14th amendment, you know. In fact, it's newer than the 1st.
English is easier said than done.
minors aren't full citizens of the united states, ask any attorney.
Actually, they are.
Nothing in the constitution says anything about giving gaming rights to people that are not citizens of the United States.
The Constitution guarantees rights, it doesn't grant them. And at any rate, the 5th, 9th, and 14th amendments protect the rights of all people in the United States to play video games.
making a law which makes it illegal to sell games (of any type, violent or not) to minors is not a violation of anyone's first amendment rights.
Possibly, however, the 1st amendment right of game developers to communicate with minors, and the 1st amendment right of minors to listen, are both implicated. Perhaps these rights are not infringed upon by the law, but it's not a given.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
They signed a bill banning obscene material on the Internet... I think 1997. It was declared unconsitutional (first amendment) and repealed soon after.
There were a few attempts. However, it was how the law was constructed, not the actual goal of restricting the supplying of adult materials to children, that was at issue. So you can't reasonably imply that because those laws failed, that therefore government cannot restrict people from providing adult material to children.
And I am still pissed at the EFF over that. They told a ton of outright lies about the CDA and COPA (such as saying the Starr Report would be illegal under COPA, despite the fact that it was quite clearly exempted under the "serious political interest" clause of the bill).