Legal News

Child Online Protection Act Gets No Love from High Court

By Dan Slater

Back in July, we mentioned that the Third Circuit effectively took a whack at social conservatives when it affirmed a lower court ruling striking down COPA, or the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law intended to protect children from sexual material and other objectionable content on the Internet. (Here’s the opinion; here’s the LB post.)

Today, the Supremes, without comment and with no noted dissents, refused the government’s request to review the Third Circuit’s decision. Here’s a report from Scotus blog.

In more Scotus news: On Friday, the High Court agreed to decide whether state officials are barred from investigating the lending practices of national banks. The case, Cuomo v. Clearing House Association, arose from a 2005 inquiry by then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer into possible racial discrimination in the real estate lending of Citigroup, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Here’s an NYT report. Get the docs from Scotus blog.

Spitzer said that information made public by the banks suggested that a much higher percentage of black and Hispanic borrowers were charged higher rates than white borrowers. The High Court’s decision to take the case comes just a couple weeks after NY AG Andrew Cuomo announced a $665,000 settlement between 455 black and Latino borrowers and mortgage brokers HCI and Consumer One. The settlement was meant to compensate minority borrowers for alleged discriminatory practices regarding fees charged for mortgage-brokerage services.

Law Blog editorial note: Due to this odd development, the Law Blog will be on a short hiatus this afternoon. We’ll pick up the pace again in a bit.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 21, 2009 (boomark / email).