Is All ‘Speech’ Good Speech? Porn Makes a Trip to the Supreme Court
Case in Point: The Legal Show on the Hottest Legal Cases in Politics and Culture
The Heritage Foundation
4.5 • 527 Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of Case in Point, we preview two big cases set to be argued within the week. Two very different online platforms have brought First Amendment free speech challenges against the government for laws regulating their operation. The implications for both could shake the foundation of some of the country's biggest platforms. In his year end report on federal courts, Chief Justice John Roberts may have tipped his hand as to how he'll rule in one of the cases....or did he? Then we discuss the need for the Supreme Court to revisit its rulings on obscenity and speech with Giancarlo Canaparo. Porn makes an appearance at the high court in a few days - is the government's interest simply in protecting kids from harmful material, or are there other considerations in play? That and more on this week's episode of Case in Point.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Right is still right, even if you stand by yourself. |
| 0:04.8 | Chief Justice, may it place the card. |
| 0:07.7 | Welcome to this week's edition of Case in Point. |
| 0:11.1 | Happy New Year. |
| 0:12.1 | I'm your host, Sarah Partial Perry, a senior legal fellow here at the Heritage Foundation |
| 0:17.1 | in Washington, D.C. |
| 0:18.5 | It is Thursday, January 9th, and there are two cases set to be heard |
| 0:23.2 | at the Supreme Court that will question whether or not online platforms when they clash with the |
| 0:29.0 | First Amendment, who will emerge victorious? In fact, in the first of those two cases, TikTok versus |
| 0:36.7 | Garland, it's scheduled for Friday, |
| 0:39.1 | which means we're going to hear oral arguments the day after you're hearing this podcast. |
| 0:43.6 | What's at issue in that case? |
| 0:45.1 | Well, a law was enacted and signed into law by President Biden in April of 2024. |
| 0:51.0 | It was, and this is a mouthful, the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that identifies China and several other hostile nations as being foreign adversaries. |
| 1:02.9 | What it does from there is ban those particular social media platforms that originate in those foreign adversary nations from being utilized in the United States. |
| 1:13.1 | Well, who comes to mind first except TikTok and its parent company Bite Dance, which are Chinese-owned |
| 1:19.9 | corporations? So they've claimed that their inability to be able to provide an online platform |
| 1:26.8 | here in the United States is a violation |
| 1:28.6 | of the First Amendment. And of course, the government has argued that this is simply just an |
| 1:36.2 | ability, just the opportunity to protect American citizens from manipulative information |
| 1:42.5 | from hostile nations outside American borders. |
| 1:46.8 | Interestingly, the federal report on the judiciary, which is something authored by the |
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