Supreme Court Mulls Gladiators and the “Human Sacrifice Channel”

Following up on my colleague David Boaz’s post about the U.S. v. Stevens “depictions of animal cruelty” case, my takeaway from this morning’s argument is that there’s not a single vote to uphold the law. The closest the government came to sympathy for its position came when Chief Justice Roberts wondered whether, if a narrower statute proscribing the “crush videos” that were the ostensible target of this legislation, the Court might uphold this broad statute on its face but also welcome many as-applied challenges in instances of prosecutorial overreach. (For a pithy discussion of facial versus as-applied challenges, noting that the Court generally favors facial attacks in First Amendment cases, see Roger Pilon’s foreword to this year’s Cato Supreme Court Review.)

A less technical line of questioning involved the constitutionality of a statute banning a hypothetical “human sacrifice channel” or the broadcast of fight-to-the-death gladiatorial battles — from a foreign country where that sort of thing is legal. (Justice Scalia quipped that the rule cannot be that you satisfy the broad legislation’s “historical value” exception if you dress up as an ancient Roman.)

Much of the analysis about these types of extreme scenarios turns on whether the broadcast/depiction creates a market for such activities — which is the rationale for banning child pornography (i.e., fewer children are subject to sexual abuse if there is not a legal market for pictures and videos of children being sexually abused). Thus, a narrow statute banning the aforementioned crush videos would be kosher, as it were, but not the broad legislation at issue — which could potentially sweep in, to take one example, promotional videos put out by the Spanish board of tourism that include bullfighting clips.

For a more detailed report, see Lyle Denniston on SCOTUSblog (whom you can also see all week on C-SPAN’s excellent Supreme Court documentary mini-series). And again, to read Cato’s view, see our amicus curiae brief.

Cross-posted at Cato's blog.