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Second Guessing The Supreme Court
A day before the issue of video game violence goes before the U.S. Supreme Court, what do we know about how the case will be decided?
Gamasutra has an excellent and informative article up today regarding the upcoming Supreme Court case; oral arguments begin tomorrow in the most important video game legislation case in history. In the article, attorney Greg Boyd lays out the details of the case and its history. More interesting to some will be his predictions about the case's outcome.
"It would be surprising to the legal community if this case went against all the prior similar cases on content-based regulation," Boyd writes. "The consensus expectation is that this case will fit with the other state cases on this issue (and the two lower court decisions in California). The preliminary injunction will likely be upheld and the statute will likely be held unconstitutional."
12 previous cases of similar legislation have all been struck down by lower courts. If we step several years into the future, it's possible that the game industry will look back on this case as the turning point, when the Supreme Court tried to settle this type of legislation once and for all, siding firmly against states trying to creating such restrictions.
Alternately, it may be that the Supreme Court wishes to say something different on the matter, or sees this law as fundamentally different from others that have been struck down in the past. As Boyd mentions in his article: "Each year about 10,000 cases are offered up to the Court for review. Of those, only about 100 will actually make it to oral argument." There must be some reason that the Court feels this case should be examined in further detail at this point in history.
We'll have an answer soon enough. The coming days should be fascinating for people interested in the future of interactive entertainment.
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