The divided court deflected one of several challenges to the 1998 law, signed by former President Clinton and later endorsed by the Bush administration. The court then returned the case to a lower court for further review or a trial on free-speech questions left unresolved.
"It's a standstill; nobody won [a complete victory]", said Ann Beeson, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who urged the high court to strike down the law outright.
Both opponents and supporters predicted the case eventually will return to the Supreme Court for a conclusive ruling on the question at the heart of the case: In the name of protecting children, does the law restrict too much material that adults have the right to see or buy?
The Child Online Protection Act requires that operators of commercial Internet sites use credit cards or some form of adults-only screening system to ensure children cannot see material deemed harmful to them.
The law could mean six months in jail and $50,000 in fines for first-time violators and additional fines for repeat offenders. It has never been enforced and remains on hold.
Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock applauded the ruling, as far as it goes, and defended the law.
"As the Child Online Protection Act undergoes further review, the Justice Department will take all available steps to support the act and keep our nation's children safe from viewing the pornography for sale on the Internet," she said.
In the central holding of a complex decision, five justices found that the law's use of the formulation "contemporary community standards" does not by itself make the law unconstitutional.
The community-standards phrase refers to the measure for determining what is harmful to minors and is rooted in previous Supreme Court decisions governing treatment of traditional pornography, such as soft-porn magazines that could be wrapped in brown paper or otherwise kept from children.
The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled the law probably was unconstitutional because of the reliance on community standards. The court barred the law from taking effect on those grounds alone, without taking up a federal judge's finding that the law had other, much broader constitutional problems.
The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the law was necessary to shield children from the growing amount of dangerous or inappropriate material available with the click of a mouse.
The ACLU, Web site operators, publishers and others complained that a community standard is an unworkable idea on the freewheeling, global Internet. That kind of shifting standard would effectively give a heckler's veto to the most conservative dot on the U.S. map, the law's opponents argued.
Eight of the nine Supreme Court justices agreed to send the case back to the appeals court, although they differed in their reasons. Only Justice John Paul Stevens dissented in full.
"In the context of the Internet, ... community standards become a sword, rather than a shield," Stevens wrote.
The law was written to replace a 1996 statute, the Communications Decency Act, which the Supreme Court unanimously struck down as unconstitutional in 1997.
That law was so broad that it covered pornographic material that adults have the right to see, as well as non-pornographic sexual material, the high court said.
Congress tried again a year later, and civil liberties groups challenged it on the same First Amendment grounds the high court found persuasive before.
Copyright 2002. Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
