Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States finally passed their ruling on the video game case, Brown vs. EMA. This ruling was a long time coming, clocking at 7 months. What came as no surprise was that the ruling was in favor of the video game industry on the grounds that the California restrictions on the sale of violent video games to minors was a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech.
I am glad that this ruling came out this way. I am also glad that they ruled the California law was a violation of free speech rather than ruling against it on grounds of “vagueness.” The ruling ended up being 7 against the law and 2 for it. The ruling itself comes in 4 parts. The first part is the majority opinion. This is the actual ruling and what has become the law of the land. This was written by Justice Scalia and was joined by 4 other justices. The second part is a concurring opinion written by Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts in which they agree that the law should be struck down, but on a different reason than the majority. While the majority ruled the law unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds, Alito and Roberts feel the law is justifiable but needed to be struck down on vagueness grounds.
The third and fourth parts are dissenting opinions from Justices Thomas and Breyer, respectively. I will be focusing on the concurring and dissenting opinions in another post.
I want to focus on some of the key points I liked in the majority opinion. (more…)
