Year Case Significance
1982 Island Trees School District v. Pico In his majority opinion, Justice William Brennan ruled that a local
school board violated the First Amendment when it ordered the
removal of books from school libraries because the board found the
books to be “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain
filthy.” The justices determined that school officials could not remove
books from school libraries simply because they disliked the ideas
contained in those books.
1982 New York v. Ferber In a unanimous opinion, the Court upheld a state law that made it a
crime to own or sell child pornography. The justices defined child
pornography as the visual depiction of sexual conduct by children
without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, and they
ruled that child pornography—like obscenity—was not protected by the
First Amendment.
1983 Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive
Health
One of three abortion decisions handed down on June 15, 1983. This 6-
3 opinion overturned portions of an Akron, Ohio, ordinance that
required the parents of unmarried minors under the age of fifteen to be
notified and to give their consent before the minors could have an
abortion. The decision also maintained it was unconstitutional to
require a woman to sign a consent form and wait twenty-four hours
before she could have an abortion.1983 Planned Parenthood Association of
Kansas City v. Ashcroft
Decided on the same day asAkron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health,
this 5-4 opinion upheld a Missouri state law requiring minors under the
age of eighteen to obtain parental consent for their abortions. While it
ruled that the Akron, Ohio, parental consent ordinance was
unconstitutional, the Court upheld the Missouri parental consent law
because it met the standard the Court had specified in a 1979 decision.1983 Simopoulos v. Virginia In the third abortion decision delivered on June 15, 1983, the Court
upheld the criminal conviction of a physician for violating a Virginia law
that required all post-first-trimester abortions to be performed in
hospitals. By an 8-1 ruling, the justices determined the law was
constitutional because it allowed for the licensing of clinics as well as
full-care hospitals, which made the law less restrictive than the laws
struck down inAkron v. Akron Center for Reproductive HealthandPlanned
Parenthood v. Ashcroft. The doctor would have avoided criminal
prosecution if his clinic had been licensed.
1983 Bob Jones University v. United States Eight of the nine justices upheld the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS)
authority to deny tax-exempt status for private religious schools that
practiced racial discrimination. The Court determined that the IRS did
not violate Bob Jones University’s First Amendment rights because the
government’s interest in the eradication of racial discrimination
outweighed a school’s need for tax-exempt status when that school
discriminated on the basis on race.
1983 Bolger v. Young Drug Products Considered a major decision in the First Amendment protection of
commercial speech, this ruling overturned a federal law that made it a
crime to send unsolicited advertisements for contraceptives through the
U.S. mail.
1983 Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission v. Wyoming
This decision extended the federal law prohibiting discrimination on
the basis of age to apply to employees of state government agencies.1106 Legislation: U.S. Supreme Court Decisions The Eighties in America