This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 29, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown. The Supreme Court heard several First Amendment cases this term, and according

to Ilia Shapiro, editor of the Cato Institute Supreme Court Review, the High Court got them all right.

Like last year with the Animal Cruelty case, Stephen's, depictions of Animal Cruelty, legislatures, including Congress, can't simply carve out a new type of

speech that's unprotected or worth less somehow. So given that, then this, violent video games is subject to strict scrutiny like anything else

And the government was not able to show a compelling reason you know if you had an overwhelming study

showing that playing for every hour of video game playing

That increases the propensity to commit murder by 1%

And that was an airtight study, the outcome might be different.

But here, because it's all speculative, and as Scalia wrote in citing our brief,

inciting the Cato brief, adults complaining about violence in different media

that children are exposed to is not a new thing and it's not a technological thing, goes back

centuries to classical literature.

So until we really have established a compelling interest for the government, we can't just

say that these violent video games are no good for purposes of the First Amendment.

As we were talking about earlier, you say that this kind of opinion can produce some weird

results if you carry it to his logical extension.

Right, this is the point that Justice Breyer made in dissent.

I don't agree with the rest of his

social dissent, kind of weigh the usefulness of the speech against his social cost,

and here's a bunch of studies,

and I'll balance them, and, okay, I disagree with with that but he did have a good line saying

it's kind of odd that we can stop a 17 year old from buying a penthouse magazine or

...