By: Derek Hawkins//June 21, 2017//
United States Supreme Court
Case Name: Packingham v. North Carolina
Case No.: 15-1194
Focus: 1st Amendment Violation
The North Carolina statute impermissibly restricts lawful speech in violation of the First Amendment
A fundamental First Amendment principle is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen once more. Today, one of the most important places to exchange views is cyberspace, particularly social media, which offers “relatively unlimited, low-cost capacity for communication of all kinds,” Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U. S. 844, 870, to users engaged in a wide array of protected First Amendment activity on any number of diverse topics. The Internet’s forces and directions are so new, so protean, and so far reaching that courts must be conscious that what they say today may be obsolete tomorrow. Here, in one of the first cases the Court has taken to address the relationship between the First Amendment and the modern Internet, the Court must exercise extreme caution before suggesting that the First Amendment provides scant protection for access to vast networks in that medium.
Reversed and remanded
Dissenting:
Concurring: Alito, Roberts, Thomas