I have previously queried whether the Constitution has a geography clause. That is, do Rights Mean Different Things in Different Places? Orin Kerr writes about a new 9th Circuit case, United States v. Kilbride that holds that national standards, and not community standards should govern Internet obscenity.
The Courts have imposed a geography clause in several areas, including fourth amendment protections, second amendment gun control laws (an oxymoron if I ever heard one), and most famously in first amendment obscenity laws.
In Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), the Supreme Court announced a three-part test to determine whether a work counts as “obscenity” for purposes of constitutional law:
(a) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and ( c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
In explaining the choice of community standards instead of national standards, the Court wrote:
Under a National Constitution, fundamental First Amendment limitations on the powers of the States do not vary from community to community, but this does not mean that there are, or should or can be, fixed, uniform national standards of precisely what appeals to the “prurient interest” or is “patently offensive.” These are essentially questions of fact, and our Nation is simply too big and too diverse for this Court to reasonably expect that such standards could be articulated for all 50 States in a single formulation, even assuming the prerequisite consensus exists. When triers of fact are asked to decide whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would consider certain materials “prurient,” it would be unrealistic to require that the answer be based on some abstract formulation. The adversary system, with lay jurors as the usual ultimate factfinders in criminal prosecutions, has historically permitted triers of fact to draw on the standards of their community, guided always by limiting instructions on the law. To require a State to structure obscenity proceedings around evidence of a national “community standard” would be an exercise in futility.
Nothing in the First Amendment requires that a jury must consider hypothetical and unascertainable “national standards” when attempting to determine whether certain materials are obscene as a matter of fact. Mr. Chief Justice Warren pointedly commented in his dissent in Jacobellis v. Ohio, supra, at 200: “It is my belief that when the Court said in Roth that obscenity is to be defined by reference to ‘community standards,’ it meant community standards — not a national standard, as is sometimes argued. I believe that there is no provable ‘national standard’ . . . . At all events, this Court has not been able to enunciate one, and it would be unreasonable to expect local courts to divine one.”
But the 9th Circuit found different standards should apply on the Internet, and rather look to a community standard, the courts should look to a national standard. In Kilbride, Judge Fletcher writes:
The divergent reasoning of the justices in and out of the majority in Ashcroft v. ACLU, 535 U.S. 564 (2002) leaves us with no explicit holding as to the appropriate geographic definition of contemporary community standards to be applied here. Nonetheless, we are able to derive guidance from the areas of agreement in the various opinions. . . .
Justices O’Connor and Breyer held more narrowly that while application of a national community standard would not or may not create constitutional concern, application of local community standards likely would. . . . Justices O’Connor and Breyer were joined by Justice Kennedy’s opinion, as well as Justice Stevens’s dissent. Accordingly, five Justices concurring in the judgment, as well as the dissenting Justice, viewed the application of local community standards in defining obscenity on the Internet as generating serious constitutional concerns.
At the same time, five justices concurring in the judgment viewed the application of a national community standard as not or likely not posing the same concerns by itself. Accordingly, following Marks, we must view the distinction Justices O’Connor and Breyer made between the constitutional concerns generated by application of a national and local community standards as controlling.
Accepting this distinction, in turn, persuades us to join Justices O’Connor and Breyer in holding that a national community standard must be applied in regulating obscene speech on the Internet, including obscenity disseminated via email. The constitutional problems identified by the five justices with applying local community standards to regulate Internet obscenity certainly generate grave constitutional doubts as to the use of such standards in applying §§ 1462 and 1465 to Defendants’ activities. Furthermore, the Court has never held that a jury may in no case be instructed to apply a national community standard in finding obscenity. To “avoid[ ] the need to examine the serious First Amendment problem that would otherwise exist,” we construe obscenity as regulated by §§ 1462 and 1465 as defined by reference to a national community standard when disseminated via the Internet.
Kerr aint buying it:
“As a matter of law, I don’t find this particularly persuasive . . . Whether the Ninth Circuit was right or wrong, the likely effect is to put a case on the Supreme Court’s docket in the next year or two on whether Internet obscenity requires a different standard than traditional obscenity. That should be a fascinating case.”
But aside from a potential misreading of 30 years of Supreme Court precedent (this is the 9th Circuit after all), does Judge Fletcher have the concept right? Especially in the context of the Internet, where information freely flows from around the world, why should a person who sends an e-mail from San Francisco to a Georgian be judged according to Macon’s community standards? While I am not sure about the validity of community standard in general, as announced in Miller, it makes even less sense to apply community standards on the Internet.
If this creates a circuit split that ultimately does go up to SCOTUS, as Kerr suggests, this may make for an interesting article. In the works, on the list.