American Libraries Association v. Pataki

By invalidating New York's attempt to regulate Internet communications, the court made it clear that the broad, national character of the Internet renders such communications susceptible only to regulation by the federal government. Thus, state attempts to regulate Internet communications will always be invalid. Viewed in conjunction with the Supreme Court's decision in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997) which struck down a law similar to the New York law on the ground that it violated the First Amendment right to free speech, the Court's decision was a welcome relief to Internet uses who feared increasing government regulation of this rapidly expanding area of communication.

Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution describes the powers of the U.S. Congress. Clause 3 of this section, generally referred to as the Commerce Clause, in part grants Congress the power to "regulate Commerce . . . among the several states." Although the Commerce Clause speaks in terms of a positive grant of power to the federal government, the Commerce Clause has long been recognized to carry an implicit negative component prohibiting the state government from regulating interstate commerce in certain respects, notably where the state regulation would burden the free flow of commerce from state to state. This "Negative Commerce Clause" was first recognized by Justice Thomas Johnson in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824). Specifically, the Supreme Court has recognized three types of state laws or regulations which are prohibited by the negative aspect of the Commerce Clause: (1) regulations which are aimed directly at prohibiting interstate commerce; (2) regulations which unduly burden interstate commerce; and (3) regulations aimed at aspects of commerce which by their very nature require uniform treatment throughout the United States. In American Libraries Association v. Pataki, the court system considered the extent to which the negative aspect of the Commerce Clause prohibited the state of New York from imposing restrictions on the types of material received over the Internet.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the proliferation of computers and computer technologies led to the development of the Internet. The Internet, a vast, complex network of interconnected computers, allows millions of computer users to communicate with each other and to access information from around the world on virtually any topic. Among these various categories of information, a large amount of material dealing with topics from drugs to pornography to weaponry is transmitted over the Internet. New York, along with a number of other states and the federal government, sought to limit the extent to which such material was sent and received over the Internet. Specifically, New York passed a law making it a crime to knowingly send over any computer communications system any sexually explicit material to a minor.

The American Library Association, along with a number of other library associations, bookstore associations, Internet service providers, and publishers filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claiming that New York had no power to regulate interstate transmission of material over the Internet, and thus the law was an unconstitutional violation of the negative aspect of the Commerce Clause. The plaintiffs asked the court to enter a preliminary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law. The court concluded that the New York statute violated the negative aspect of the Commerce Clause, and thus the plaintiffs were entitled to an injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law.