Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/09pdf/08-769.pdf
Page Number: 23.0

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

19 

Opinion of the Court 

ing Virginia v. American Booksellers Assn., Inc., 484 U. S. 
383,  397  (1988);  omission  in  original),  for  doing  so  would 
constitute  a  “serious  invasion  of  the  legislative  domain,” 
United  States  v.  Treasury  Employees,  513  U. S.  454,  479, 
n. 26 (1995), and sharply diminish Congress’s “incentive to 
draft  a  narrowly  tailored  law  in  the  first  place,”  Osborne, 
495 U. S., at 121.  To read §48 as the Government desires 
requires rewriting, not just reinterpretation. 

* 

* 

* 
Our construction of §48 decides the constitutional ques-
tion; the Government makes no effort to defend the consti-
tutionality  of  §48  as  applied  beyond  crush  videos  and 
depictions of animal fighting.  It argues that those particu-
lar depictions are intrinsically related to criminal conduct
or  are  analogous  to  obscenity  (if  not  themselves  obscene),
and  that  the  ban  on  such  speech  is  narrowly  tailored  to
reinforce  restrictions  on  the  underlying  conduct,  prevent
additional crime arising from the depictions, or safeguard
public  mores.  But  the  Government  nowhere  attempts  to
extend  these  arguments  to  depictions  of  any  other  activi-
ties—depictions  that  are  presumptively  protected  by  the
First Amendment but that remain subject to the criminal
sanctions of §48. 

Nor  does  the  Government  seriously  contest  that  the
presumptively impermissible applications of §48 (properly 
construed) far outnumber any permissible ones.  However 
“growing” and “lucrative” the markets for crush videos and
dogfighting  depictions  might  be,  see  Brief  for  United 
States 43, 46 (internal quotation marks omitted), they are
dwarfed by the market for other depictions, such as hunt-
ing magazines and videos, that we have determined to be
within  the  scope  of  §48.    See  supra,  at  13–14.  We  there-
fore need not and do not decide whether a statute limited 
to  crush  videos  or  other  depictions  of  extreme  animal 
cruelty would be constitutional.  We hold only that §48 is