Nevertheless, lawmakers have found more creative and indirect ways

In 1998, Clinton signed COPA into law, and within twenty four hours, the ACLU had filed suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, challenging the constitutionality of the law under the First Amendment and seeking a preliminary injunction against its enforcement. In order to succeed in obtaining an injunction, it must be shown that there is a substantial likelihood that the moving party will succeed on the merits. After finding that there was indeed a substantial likelihood that COPA would be struck down as unconstitutional, the District Court granted the ACLU's motion for a preliminary injunction, prohibiting COPA's enforcement while litigation on its merits is pending.

Hence, the purpose of this essay is twofold: 1) to extrapolate and defend the reasoning used by the courts in finding that the CDA and COPA are not narrowly tailored enough to avoid trampling on broad swathes of constitutionally protected speech; and 2) nevertheless, to argue that the courts have no grounds, in law or fact, to assert that the state has a compelling interest in protecting minors from sexually explicit speech. Put another way, this essay will show that the correct analysis regarding the constitutionality of the CDA and COPA is that the Government's interest in protecting minors from sexually explicit speech is not a compelling one, and even if it were, the CDA and COPA would not present a means of achieving that interest that is narrowly tailored enough to avoid infringing on protected speech.

Whoever . . . in interstate or foreign communications . . . by means of a telecommunications device knowingly . . . makes, creates, solicits and . . . initiates the transmission of . . . any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication which is obscene or indecent, knowing that the recipient of the communication is under 18 years of age, regardless of whether the maker of such communication placed the call or initiated the communication . . . shall be fined in accordance with Title 18, or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

The chief differences between the Roth/Memoirs test and the Miller standard are that under Miller, the state no longer has to show that the work in question is utterly without redeeming social importance. Instead, the state only has to establish that the work lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Although this is still a high threshold for the state to reach, it nonetheless provides states with a measure of leeway. If the first two elements of the test are satisfied, a state may impose content-based restrictions on material that has perhaps some redeeming social importance, as long as it has no serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Furthermore, the reality of the Internet is such that Congress can attempt to censor online speech of domestic origin as much as it wants, but it cannot touch anyone in Amsterdam, for example, who wants to set up a porn site. Minors in the United States can just as easily access web sites set up in foreign countries as they can sites created in the United States. Being that foreign web sites now account for roughly half of the World Wide Web, it is difficult to understand what Congress thinks it is going to accomplish in the way of "protecting children" by threatening web site owners in the United States with criminal sanctions. The only conceivable consequence of enacting laws such as the CDA and COPA is a profound chilling effect on constitutionally protected online speech.

These defenses require anyone who makes or provides sexually explicit communications over the Internet to take considerable, often expensive steps to prevent minors from accessing them. It is important to note that it does not matter whether the communications are made via email, chat room, newsgroup message, or a web site. Moreover, in the case of a web site, the statute makes no differentiation between commercial an

Some common words found in the essay are:
Not-So-Compelling Government, Internet Section, Third Circuit, Supreme Court, Wide Web, Justice Brennan, CDA COPA, Powell Stevens, Justice Burger, Filthy Words, sexually explicit, explicit speech, sexually explicit speech, supreme court, protecting minors, sexually explicit material, explicit material, strict scrutiny, patently offensive, narrowly tailored, minors sexually explicit, minors sexually, community standards, world wide web, compelling protecting minors,
Approximate Word count = 9327
Approximate Pages = 37 (250 words per page double spaced)