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Supreme Court Case Summary

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The United States Supreme Court case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011), full case name: Edmund Brown; Governor of the State of California and Kamala Harris; Attorney General of the State of California v. Entertainment Merchants Association and Entertainment Software Association, was a landmark Supreme Court case dealing with the constitutionality and technicality of California’s Assembly Bill 1179 (2005).
California Assembly Bill 1179, approved by state legislature and signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005, sought to regulate and prohibit the sale or rental of violent videos games to minors as well as requiring labeling in advance of the existing Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) rating system
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It is interesting to keep in mind that before Schwarzenegger became governor he was an actor in generally violent movies, which made top box offices and did not receive any government intervention, what a hypocrite, but can’t that be said about most politicians anyway? The next level of the Federal court process is the United States Court of Appeals which has appellate jurisdiction, meaning they can only hear appeal cases, review the decisions of the lower courts and check for errors. Appellate courts do not offer a new trial but deal with constitutionality or technicality of the case at hand. For most the US Court of Appeals is their final option since the US Supreme Court on average takes seventy-five cases out of the ten-thousand they receive per term. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower courts decision declaring that “invalid content based restriction on speech is subject to strict scrutiny and not variable obscenity” (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/9th/0716620P.pdf). Strict scrutiny is the idea that laws must be narrowly tailored to promote a compelling government interest. Since California had not validated a compelling interest, it infringed upon rights granted by the First Amendment. The US Appellate court also declared that the labeling requirement violates the First Amendment as unconstitutionally compelled speech since the law could not “clearly nor legally provide a way to determine if a video game is violent, as a result the labeling does not convey factual information”
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