On Wednesday, ten years after Congress approved it, a federal law designed to keep Internet pornography away from children, died a quiet death after the Supreme Court declared it as unconstitutional and violative of free-speech rights.

The same day, the court also unanimously ruled in favour of a 5-year-old Massachusetts kindergarten schoolgirl subjected to repeated harassment by a third-grade boy on their school bus and her parents, suing the local school district, under a post-Civil War civil rights law and Title IX, a 1972 law barring sex discrimination in schools receiving federal grants.

Rejecting the Justice Department's appeal in defence of the anti-porn law, the High Court accorded a victory to those who argued Congress's efforts to regulate cyberspace and keep minors away from online pornography violated the First Amendment.

The law in question requires website operators to use credit cards or adult access codes, including personal identification numbers, in a bid to prevent minors from viewing harmful pornography. Penalty for violating the law was six months in prison along with a fine of as much as $50,000 per day.

After the Supreme Court struck down another law called the Communications Decency Act on grounds of free-speech, the new anti-porn law was adopted in 1998; however, it was never enforced, with the lower courts repeatedly striking it down as unconstitutional, overly broad and far too vague.

The 3rd U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled the law violated the Constitution's First Amendment guarantees of free-speech, and felt filtering technologies and other parental control tools offered a less restrictive way to protect children from inappropriate content online. Challenged by The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of booksellers, online magazine publishers, writers, artists and health educators, Chris Hansen, lead attorney for ACLU stated, a large amount of valuable online speech, adults were entitled to communicate or receive, government experts put the number at 700-million plus web pages, would be criminalized by the law. ACLU lawyers told the court, use of content filters would prove more effective than the law, as it did not address issues like online predators on social-networking sites, rather only targeted commercial Web publishers.

Critics opined, the law would not deter pornographers, as they would simply base their operations offshore, beyond reach of U. S. authorities. While, it is unusual for a major federal law to be killed, without so much as a hearing, the Supreme Court refused to hear the Justice Department's appeal without comment, and has allowed the appeals court ruling to stand.