United States v. Williams, 553 U.S. 285 (2008), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that a federal statute prohibiting the "pandering" of child pornography (offering or requesting to transfer, sell, deliver, or trade the items) did not violate the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, even if a person charged under the code did not in fact possess child pornography with which to trade.
The decision overturned the Eleventh Circuit's ruling that the statute was facially void for overbreadth and vagueness. The Supreme Court reasoned that there is no First Amendment protection for offers to engage in illegal transactions, and that banning "the collateral speech that introduces such material into the child-pornography distribution network" does not in fact criminalize a "substantial amount of protected speech."
Read more about United States V. Williams: Background, Important Notes/dictation, See Also, References
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states and/or williams:
“The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in action ... a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet this is his very being.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“What is more pretentiously
useless
or about which
we more pride ourselves?
It leads as often as not
to our undoing.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)