Connection Distributing Co. v. Holder’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

21 federal appellate · 1 district · 2 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 49 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Congress’s “unanimous concern” in enacting [§ 2257] was to deter the production and distribution of child pornography. Congress singled out these types of pornography for regulation not because of their effect on audiences but because doing so was the only way to ensure that its existing ban on child pornography could be meaningfully enforced. That objective not only is independent of the content of the regulated speech, but it also is a concern of the highest order, one that relates to a category of speech that the government may regulate, indeed completely suppress, based on its content.... Nor does the law implicate the central risk of a content-based regulation of speech: that the government has impermissibly interfered with the free exchange of ideas by imposing trade barriers on certain viewpoints but not on others. No doubt, § 2257 favors a particular viewpoint on this issue: Congress is against child pornography and is using this law to prevent it. Although that kind of viewpoint discrimination normally would be fatal to a law, that is not true here because the Constitution allows the government to embrace this viewpoint and to act on it by imposing a complete trade barrier on the production and trafficking of this kind of speech. What we have, then, is a valid speech-related end — eliminating child pornography — followed by a means of achieving that end, a proof-of-age requirement that refers to the content of the speech (specifically defined images) not because of i”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Attorney General of the United States · 729 F. Supp. 2d 691 - FREE SPEECH COALITION, INC. v. Holder

2. “[i]t is not the usual judicial practice, however, nor do we consider it generally desirable, to proceed to an overbreadth issue unnecessarily-that is, before it is determined that the Statute would be valid as applied. Such a course would convert use of the overbreadth doctrine from a necessary means of vindicating the plaintiff's own right not to be bound by a Statute that is unconstitutional into a means of mounting gratuitous wholesale attacks upon state and federal laws.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Free Speech Coal., Inc. v. Sessions · Volkswagen of America, Inc. v. Smit

3. “A facial challenge to a law is no small matter. At stake is not an attempt to invalidate the law in a discrete setting but an effort “to leave nothing standing,” Warshak v. United States, 532 F.3d 521, 528 (6th Cir.2008) (en banc), to invalidate the law in each of its applications, to take the law off the books completely. That, to be sure, is the fate some laws deserve — either because the defect in the law infects all or virtually all of its applications (say, a race-based classification or a law serving an unconstitutional purpose) or because the constitutional problems cannot meaningfully be severed. See, e.g., Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578, 585-594 , 107 S.Ct. 2573 , 96 L.Ed.2d 510 (1987); City of Houston v. Hill, 482 U.S. 451, 468-69 , 107 S.Ct. 2502 , 96 L.Ed.2d 398 (1987); see also Michael C. Dorf, Facial Challenges to State and Federal Statutes, 46 Stan. L.Rev. 235, 279-82 (1994). But before the courts will announce such a judgment, they generally insist that the claimant show one of two things: (1) that there truly are “no” or at least few “circumstances” in “which the Act would be valid,” United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 745 , 107 S.Ct. 2095 , 95 L.Ed.2d 697 (1987); see also Wash. State Grange v. Wash. State Republican Party, 552 U.S. 442 , 128 S.Ct. 1184, 1190 , 170 L.Ed.2d 151 (2008); or (2) that a court cannot sever the unconstitutional textual provisions of the law or enjoin its unconstitutional applications.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Coleman v. Ann Arbor Transportation Authority