WASHINGTON — A California law that would forbid the sale of violent video games to minors won a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday. The state argues that exceptionally violent material can be kept out of the hands of children without running afoul of the First Amendment.
At issue are video games that permit young players to shoot, wound or kill human characters.The move could signal that the court’s broad protection for free speech in other contexts does not necessarily extend to children and teenagers.
“The court might be willing to draw a line between the adult First Amendment and the ‘child’s First Amendment,’ ” said Rodney Smolla, a free-speech expert and dean of the Washington and Lee Law School in Virginia.
Six other states — Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Washington — have laws similar to California’s. All those measures have been invalidated on free-speech grounds in response to lawsuits by the video-gaming industry.
It was something of a surprise that the high court agreed to hear California’s appeal just a week after the justices, in a 8-1 ruling, struck down on free-speech grounds a federal law that made it a crime to sell videos of illegal acts of animals being tortured or maimed. In their ruling, the justices said they were wary of creating a new category of unprotected expression and that the law was too broadly worded.
