Massachusetts v. Oakes

Oakes was sentenced to ten years in prison for violating a Massachusetts statute that read, in part:

Whoever with knowledge that a person is a child under eighteen years of age . . . hires, coerces, solicits, or entices, employs, procures, uses, causes, encourages, or knowingly permits such child to pose or be exhibited in a state of nudity or to participate or engage in any live performance or in any act that depicts, describes, or represents sexual conduct for purpose of visual representation or reproduction in any book, magazine, pamphlet, motion picture film, photograph, or picture shall be punished . . .

The law went on to specify the punishment: ten to 20 years in prison, a fine of $10,000 to $50,000, or both. The law also specified that a person would not be prosecuted if such pictures were intended for a scientific or medical purpose, or for "an educational or cultural purpose for a bona fide school, museum, or library."

Oakes appealed, and the Massachusetts Supreme Court reversed his conviction. They found that Oakes's posing L. S. for the semi-nude photographs was a kind of self-expression, or "speech," and was therefore guaranteed under the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech. The majority also found that the Massachusetts statute was overbroad.

As it is used in U.S. constitutional law, a statute is overbroad if it prohibits not just actions that might reasonably be considered illegal, but also actions that are protected by the U.S. Constitution. In the case of the Massachusetts statute, the prohibition against posing under-aged children in "any act that depicts . . . sexual conduct" might be considered illegal. However, the act also prohibited posing under-aged children "in a state of nudity." The Massachusetts Supreme Court thought this was going too far. In their view, the statute "criminalized conduct that virtually every person would regard as lawful, [making] a criminal of a parent who takes a frontal view picture of his or her naked one-year-old running on a beach or romping in a wading pool."

Overbroad statutes have one very special feature. Whereas most laws can be challenged in court only on the grounds that they are directly affecting the plaintiff, an overbroad law can be challenged on the grounds that it might adversely affect someone else. In other words, Oakes could challenge the Massachusetts law not on the grounds that he had been hurt by it, but on the grounds that such a law posed a danger to free speech. Even if Oakes had been committing an act that a better-written law could condemn, he was still free to challenge the law on the grounds that another, more innocent person would be unduly hurt by the law.