Lillian R. BeVier

Controlling communications that teach or demonstrate violence: "the movie made them do it".

iolence sells. Americans have what sometimes seems to be an insatiable appetite for it. Depictions and V descriptions of violence saturate our culture. kngs urge us to rape women, M1 police officers, and commit suicide. Movies portray-indeed they glorifyviolence as an intrinsic element of every imaginable plot line. Despite substantial evidence that an individual’s repeated exposure to portrayals of violence is associated with significantly increased likelihood that the individual will commit aggressive acts against others,’ no legal regime currently regulates such portrayals either on television, in music, in movies, or in video games. Neither Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, nor any state legislature has yet mustered the political will to impose substantial or systematic legal constraints upon producers or purveyors of violent images. Official censorship is rightly to be feared, but unreflective invocations of our commitment to freedom of speech provide incomplete justification for our legal regime’s apparent indifference to the possibility that media-induced violence may impose substantial costs on innocent victims. Industries other than entertainment are subject to substantial regulation; and in other industries profit-making corporations are held by tort law to farreaching duties to protect not only their customers but also innocent bystanders from harm that their products cause.* What reasons of legal policy counsel against imposing similar regulations and duties on the entertainment industry? Ought we to reconsider them? This paper offers a modest beginning to the exploration of the reasons that suppon. the legal and political decision to refrain from regulating media portrayals of

United States v American Library Association: Whither First Amendment Doctrine

In United States v American Library Association, Inc.1 the Supreme Court sustained the Childrens Internet Protection Act (CIPA),2 which Congress enacted to address problems associated with the ready availability of Internet pornography to children in public libraries.3 Considering whether to attempt a partial solution to the problem by encouraging libraries to use filtering software, Congress confronted a dilemma. Software filters exist that can block

Full of Surprises—and More to Come: Randall v Sorrell, the First Amendment, and Campaign Finance Regulation

On March 27, 2002, President Bush signed the BipartisanCampaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA). BCRA was a sweeping campaign finance regulation measure among whose major provisions were restrictions on political party soft money and independent corporate and union issue advertising during election campaigns. The act was immediately challenged on constitutional grounds, and complex litigation ensued in which eleven separate lawsuits were consolidated and assigned to a three-judge District Court. On December 10, 2003, the lawsuit culminated in a “stunning triumph for campaign finance reform” when in McConnell v FEC 3 a 5–4 majority of the Supreme Court sustained the act’s major provisions.

What Ails Us

Is American democracy sick? If so, what ails it? More importantly, can the disease be cured? Can its symptoms be alleviated by imaginative and well-crafted laws? Or is it a genetic disorder embedded in the DNA of modern representative government and thus unlikely to yield to therapeutic manipulation? In recent years, advocates of increased campaign finance regulation have often expressed the view that our democracy is indeed pitifully ill, that it has fallen prey to an inert citizenry and the pervasive and undue influence of money. Reformers implicitly believe, however, that the disease is