The 2004 law sought to ban the sale of violent video games to minors.
The Supreme Court today refused to overturn a ruling against California law that would have banned the sale and rental to minors of games determined violent. The 2004 law would have imposed a $1000 fine on retailers for each offense of the law.
The case, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (filed as Schwarzenegger v. EMA), was originally decided in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Court upheld the ruling on First Amendment rights of free speech and free expression.
The 7-2 opinion rejected the state's argument that there was compelling governmental interest in preventing minors from obtaining violent video games. California asserted that the law would help parents prevent the perceived psychological harm they content comes from interacting with violent material rather than just consuming it passively.
In the opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia noted that the law would create a new category of unprotected speech, rather than "adjust[ing] the boundaries of an existing category of unprotected speech." The court took issue with the creation of such a category, noting that any such restriction would have to pass strict scrutiny. The strict scrutiny test states that restrictions of constitutional rights must be justified by a compelling governmental interest, be narrowly tailored to that interest, and achieve that interest via the least restrictive means.
The California law fails all three criteria.
The court noted that the state was unable to illustrate the governmental interest, "[the state] acknowledges that it cannot show a direct causal link between violent video games and harm tor minors." The studies presented by the state were determined to be unpersuasive and the effect violent video games had on children were "both small and indistinguishable from effects produced by other media."
The law is also not sufficiently narrow to pass scrutiny. The state justified the law as a "means of aiding parental authority," in selecting what media their children consume. The legislation only meets that goal when discussing parents "who care whether they purchase violent video games...its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want." The ruling concluded that this failure of the justification to apply in all cases renders it insufficiently narrow.
Lastly, the court found that the means the state used to achieve the goal are not the "least restrictive" available. It noted that the ESRB's voluntary rating system "already achieves that to a large extent."
This case is the latest victory for the Entertainment Merchants Association and the Entertainment Software Association, who were also party to the case. Similar cases have struck down laws in Michigan, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, Washington State, and Oklahoma
