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Supreme Court Issues Constitutionally Correct but otherwise Unfortunate Animal Cruelty Law Decision

By Andis Kaulins

See Scotus Blog on First Amendment left intact: Animal cruelty videos escape ban and Mark Sherman at the Huffington Post in Supreme Court Overturns Animal Cruelty Video Ban: Ruling Could Spur New 'Crush' Videos.

Essentially, this is a Constitutionally correct, but very unfortunate 8-1 Supreme Court decision.
We fully appreciate Justice Alito's dissent, as he is the only Justice right on the result.

There is no question that the Supreme Court is technically right on the law, but wrong in the decision.

What the Supreme Court should do in this kind of a case is to alert the Congress that it is going to find an overly broad law like this rightly unconstitutional, but the Supremes should then delay publication of this kind of a harmful decision -- which has clear negative consequences for the nation as a whole the minute it is proclaimed -- and the Court should give Congress a grace period to quickly pass new conforming legislation which not broadly -- but very specifically -- bans certain kinds of depictions of animal cruelty in order not to open the doors to perpetrators of it.

Who says it can not do this? I see nothing in the laws that prohibit it.

I am surprised the Supreme Court does not investigate more modern methods of communicating with Congress to avoid this kind of thing, where months may now pass before conforming new legislation is passed and in the meantime, many animals will needlessly suffer, not to speak of the negative impact that these things have on public morals and values.

At the same time, there has got to be some kind of a mechanism developed in Congress to try to get the Senators and Representatives in Congress to become aware that they have to tailor their laws to the requirements of the U.S. Constitution -- are they completely oblivious of the nation's highest law when they pass legislation in Washington? Any 1st-year law student with a brain in his head can see that this legislation was overly broad.

Full post as published by LawPundit on April 21, 2010 (boomark / email).