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Judge Blocks California Law Limiting Publication of Actor's Ages (politico.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the come-and-rejoice dept.

mi writes: IMDb has a reason to rejoice. Politico reports: "A federal judge has barred the State of California from enforcing a new law limiting online publication of actors' ages. Acting in a case brought by online movie information website IMDb, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria ruled Wednesday that the California law likely violates the First Amendment and appears poorly tailored to proponents' stated goal of preventing age discrimination in Hollywood. The judge expressed deep skepticism that the law, which he said appeared to apply only to IMDb, would have any effect on discrimination. The judge rejected the state's arguments that the law was a regulation of commercial speech, finding that IMDb was acting as a publisher in posting the birthday and age information online." "It's not clear how preventing one mere website from publishing age information could meaningfully combat discrimination at all. And even if restricting publication on this one website could confer some marginal anti-discrimination benefit, there are likely more direct, more effective, and less speech-restrictive ways of achieving the same end," Chhabria wrote in a three-page order.

2 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:First Ammendment by alexo · · Score: 5, Informative

    How can the State of California breach the 1st Ammendment. I was under the belief that the US Constitution said what the Federal government could do, and had no effect on the States themselves, which would each have their own constitution.

    It used to be the case until the 14th amendment extended constitutional protection to all levels of government.

  2. 14th amendment, as (mis?)applied by raymorris · · Score: 5, Informative

    The 14th amendment applies the first to the states. Two different clauses of the 14th are important.

    The 14th amendment includes the following words:
    --
    No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States
    __
    (Privileges or Immunities Clause)

    The guy who wrote those words, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Bingham, said his words mean the first eight amendments apply to the states as well. The 14th says that states are not allowed to violate the first through eigth amendments, according to the guy who wrote the 14th.

    Shortly afterward, in the Slaughterhouse cases, SCOTUS "interpreted" Bingham's words to mean virtually nothing at all, and ruled that they did not mean what Bingham said they mean. (A really stupid ruling, given that Bingham was right there telling them what he meant when he wrote it.)

    Later, SCOTUS realized they did need to apply some of the amendments to the states, but they had already vanished the wording in 14th that did so, by "interpreting" those words in a ridiculous way. SCOTUS doesn't like to reverse itself, so they decided to take a different part of the 14th, the "due process clause", and pretend THAT clause applies the 1st to the states. The plain language doesn't support that interpretation at all, but that's what SCOTUS had to do to avoid reversing their earlier slaughterhouse decision.

    So what we're left with now is the words of the 14th apply the 1st to the states, by the privileges and immunities clause. But because SCOTUS doesn't like to reverse decisions, they pretend the 14th does so via the due process clause. We end up in the right place, via stupid logic.