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High Court Will Not Hear Web Censorship Case
In January the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a 1996 Virginia law that prohibits state employees from using state-owned computers to view sexually explicit material over the Internet. Historian Melvin Urofsky of Virginia Commonwealth University and five other professors from Virginia’s public universities, who teach topics including psychology, constitutional law, literature, and gay and lesbian studies, had filed suit against the law, arguing that it violates their academic freedom to do research in their areas of special interest. The professor-plaintiffs won a favorable ruling in the federal district court, but the state prevailed at the next level, at which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ultimately ruled 8 to 4 in favor of sustaining the Virginia law.
The AAUP worked with the plaintiffs and their American Civil Liberties Union attorneys for several years and, in conjunction with the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the plaintiffs’ petition to the Supreme Court. "The Court’s decision not to hear the professors’ case is disappointing," says AAUP staff counsel Donna Euben, the principal author of the brief.
"The ultimate effect of the Fourth Circuit’s fractured opinion is limited, but we’re concerned that the majority misinterpreted the strong constitutional grounding of individual academic freedom," she explains. "The majority’s finding that research on sexual themes conducted by state-funded university professors fails to involve matters of public concern and is therefore undeserving of First Amendment protection is also deeply troubling."
For background on the case, see "Academic Freedom and the Internet" in the May–June 1998 issue of Academe and "Cyberspace Censorship Threatens Academic Freedom in Virginia," in the September–October 2000 issue.
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