The mere fact that something is illegal to produce will tend to reduce the supply of it in most commercial channels. Yes, if someone really wants to download obscene materials, they will go ahead and purchase it online, and download it. You won't find it available as a "premium" channel when you check into a hotel, however, nor will it be offered by your cable provider. We can argue about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but the fact is that when you make something illegal, it removes it from "respectable" distribution channels.

You always have to ask the question: will removing a commodity from "respectable" channels make much of a difference with respect to the social problems that you seek to solve? Drug addicts will still seek out their drug, even if it is illegal. Most people will not seek it out, even if the drug is legal.

The people that are likely to be removed from the market for the drug are those who were not addicted, but were using it occasionally -- and they aren't usually the problem. The real gain may be the people that do not even start to use the drug because of its illegality, and who wish to avoid the stigma or the risk of purchasing through black market channels. I am not sure that the analogy of obscenity to drugs works very well. While there are people who are addicted to obscenity (in a psychological sense), I do not get the impression that they are the mass market for it. Making obscenity illegal means that a lot of people who occasionally watch the clearly illegal materials will find it more difficult to obtain. For many, this will be enough of a barrier to switch them to erotica that do not violate the Supreme Court's Miller test, or find some other source of entertainment.

These narrowly-defined excise taxes -- which are always supposed to fund some new government initiative aimed at solving the problems created by the thing being taxed -- aggravate me a great deal because they never work.  Much like "sin" taxes levied on booze and tobacco, rarely do they result in a reduction in the use of the product or service being taxed.  And if they do that usually only prompts government bureaucrats to demand new sources of revenue to continue funding whatever initiative it is they started with the original tax’s revenues. 

Of course, in the view of the Founders, the best defense against religious establishment is not words on a piece of paper, not a mere "parchment barrier," but rather religious pluralism itself. In a genuinely pluralistic society, the give-and-take of politics conducted by worried minorities, all eager to have half a loaf rather than none, will militate against the seizure of power by an oppressive religious majority. When and if a group overreaches, the others will unite to fight back.

Here is how the Supreme Court’s apparently conflicting Ten Commandments decisions can be reconciled: don’t wait to litigate; never try to accommodate. While purporting to promote a peaceful public arena, the effective majority would rather short-circuit the political process in favor of the kind of intransigent claims we advance in courts. Such leadership and statesmanship as can be brought to bear in these cases will come only from the judges themselves. Rather than permitting pluralism to work in its untidy but ultimately benign way, the courts will protect us from ourselves.

What the Court proffers us, in the final analysis, is a kind of judicial guardianship virtually guaranteeing a perpetual political adolescence. 

Twenty-one months of investigation. A seven-hour hearing. “Hundreds” of billable hours spent lawyering. And no evidence from what I can tell that they ever actually refused to serve anyone. Don’t celebrate too much. Here’s the relevant part of the statute at issue, the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance. The commissioners simply didn’t have a category available to them to rule the way they would have liked. But statutes can be changed and I’m guessing this one probably will be.

To be constitutional, even a limited content-neutral no-picketing zone must be defined with sufficient precision. A Kansas funeral-picketing law, for instance, was struck down in 1995 because it banned picketing "before" and "after" funerals without defining those terms. (It has since been reenacted with more precise terms and struck down again.)

I'm not sure what legislatures should do about funeral picketing. I strongly sympathize with the desire to shield the grieving, especially given how cruel and contemptible many of the funeral picketers have been; I also think little would be lost to public debate if funeral picketing is banned. On the other hand, I do worry about the slippery-slope risks from any new exception to free-speech principles. In any case, though, I've tried to explain what First Amendment law is now, whether or not that's the way it should be.