A much-anticipated Supreme Court ruling on the Child Online Protection Act did not appear June 28, but various reports indicate the high court is likely to deliver the ruling June 29, before adjourning the term.
"They generally decide all their cases in any particular term during that term," said Florida-based First Amendment attorney Lawrence G. Walters to AVNOnline.com. "It would be very unusual for it to be held over [to the following term]. The court adjourned tomorrow, not today, so we believe tomorrow is D-day and the ruling will likely be released tomorrow."
Chicago-based attorney J.D. Obenberger agreed that it is very rare for the Supreme Court to hold over one term's case until the following term, saying there might have been technical reasons why the COPA ruling wasn't handed down Monday. There could also be, in theory, one or more other cases that might prompt the Court to hold over COPA or other cases until the fall term, but Obenberger said the Court's standard is to decide all a term's cases before a term expires, with extremely rare instances of the Court holding a case over to the following term.
"The way the court works is, they take an initial straw vote, and whoever is the most vocal [among the justices] is tasked by the Chief Justice to write the opinion," he said. "And at conference, they share [the opinion] around. They vote with it, write concurrences, or they vote against it and write dissents. They're in conference all alone in the room and they circulate the draft, and they could even delay it if it's a majority opinion but they lose votes and it has to be recrafted."
The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued to stop the COPA in the first place, has argued that the law is too broadly written and likely to punish a vast range of expression. The government has argued that the law addressed such objections as killed the original Child Pornography Prevention Act, and that the "problem" of Internet porn is a "rising…essentially unavoidable" menace.
