Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/09pdf/08-769.pdf
Page Number: 3

Cite as:  559 U. S. ____ (2010) 

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Syllabus 

cruelty  vary  widely  from  place  to  place.    Hunting  is  unlawful  in  the 
District of Columbia, for example, but there is an enormous national
market for hunting-related depictions, greatly exceeding the demand
for  crush  videos  or  animal  fighting  depictions.    Because  the  statute 
allows  each  jurisdiction  to  export its laws to  the rest of the country, 
§48(a) applies to any magazine or video depicting lawful hunting that
is sold in the Nation’s Capital.  Those seeking to comply with the law
face  a  bewildering  maze  of  regulations  from  at  least  56  separate  ju-
risdictions.  Pp. 11–15. 

(3) Limiting §48’s reach to crush videos and depictions of animal
fighting  or  other  extreme  cruelty,  as  the  Government  suggests,  re-
quires  an  unrealistically  broad  reading  of  the  statute’s  exceptions
clause.  The statute only exempts material with “serious” value, and
“serious” must be taken seriously.  The excepted speech must also fall
within one of §48(b)’s enumerated categories.  Much speech does not.
For example, most hunting depictions are not obviously instructional 
in  nature.    The  exceptions  clause  simply  has  no  adequate  reading
that results in the statute’s banning only the depictions the Govern-
ment would like to ban. 

Although the language of §48(b) is drawn from the Court’s deci-
sion  in  Miller v.  California, 413  U. S.  15,  the  exceptions  clause  does
not  answer  every  First  Amendment  objection.    Under  Miller,  “seri-
ous” value shields depictions of sex from regulation as obscenity.  But 
Miller  did  not  determine  that  serious  value  could  be  used  as  a  gen-
eral precondition to protecting other types of speech in the first place.
Even “ ‘wholly neutral futilities . . . come under the protection of free
speech.’ ”  Cohen  v.  California,  403  U. S.  15,  25.    The  First  Amend-
ment  presumptively  extends  to  many  forms  of  speech  that  do  not 
qualify  for  §48(b)’s  serious-value  exception,  but  nonetheless  fall 
within §48(c)’s broad reach.  Pp. 15–17. 

(4) Despite the Government’s assurance that it will apply §48 to
reach only “extreme” cruelty, this Court will not uphold an unconsti-
tutional  statute  merely  because  the  Government  promises  to  use  it
responsibly.    Nor  can  the  Court  construe  this  statutory  language  to 
avoid  constitutional  doubt.    A  limiting  construction  can  be  imposed
only  if  the  statute  “is  ‘readily  susceptible’  to  such  a  construction,” 
Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U. S. 844, 884.  To read 
§48  as  the  Government  desires  requires  rewriting,  not  just  reinter-
pretation.  Pp. 18–19.   

(5) This  construction  of  §48  decides  the  constitutional  question. 
The  Government  makes  no  effort  to  defend  §48  as  applied  beyond
crush videos and depictions of animal fighting.  It argues that those 
particular  depictions  are  intrinsically  related  to  criminal  conduct  or
are  analogous  to  obscenity  (if  not  themselves  obscene),  and  that  the