Pornography Laws and the United States Constitution

There are limitations on free speech, and there always have been. It's the old 'yelling fire in a crowded theater' bit. Free speech is also limited by laws against slander.

Laws regulating pornography are often (these days) not quite so directly against its expression. Instead, they may focus on zoning (e. g. no sales within 1000 feet of an elementary school), or protecting children (no child porn), or measures intended to fight the crime which may accompany the availability of porn. In all fairness, when porn is zoned into nasty parts of town, the crime is already there.

The (American) First Amendment guarantees that the government will not abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press. But the role of the US Supreme Court is to interpret the Constitution, communicating what boundaries and limits there might be on First Amendment rights. In the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that “obscenity” is not covered under the First Amendment. As such, obscenity laws have been on the books on the state and federal level for a long time. Many times these laws have been upheld by the courts; other times not. The big question for the courts has been how “obscenity” should be defined as a legal term. In Miller v. California, the United States Supreme Court ruled that obscenity laws apply to a materials or performance which. . .

“taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest in sex; portrays, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and, taken as a whole, does not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Thank you,

The Supreme Court requires that if a law is to restrict our Constitutional rights somehow, that law has to be justified by fulfilling a compelling public need, and the law has to be narrowly tailored so that its only impact is to address that compelling public need.

Note:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny