2257 Lawsuit Update
July 19th, 2013
If you’ve been following my blog for any period of time you already know that I am one of the named plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to have the laws commonly known as 2257 and 2257A declared unconstitutional.
We filed our lawsuit, Free Speech Coalition, et al. v. Holder, in 2009. After much legal maneuvering, we finally had our trial last month.
Yesterday the judge issued his ruling on the lawsuit. As we expected, he was unwilling to declare the laws to be in violation of the constitution. That was really not a surprise. We were a bit surprised that the judge did agree with us on one point, that the unannounced, warrentless inspections of records in homes does violate the protections of the 4th Amendment. That’s some progress.
Of course, this is far from the end of the legal process. Our lawyers are still working on what our next step will be, but it’s fairly certain that yesterday’s ruling will be appealed. It’s quite possible that eventually the Supreme Court will end up making the final decision about this law. That’s no doubt some years away.
My active part is pretty much done now. I went to federal court in Philadelphia last month and said my piece on the witness stand. That’s now part of the record that the lawyers will argue over for years to come.
If you’d like to read the judge’s opinion it is available on the court’s website at this link: http://www.paed.uscourts.gov/documents/opinions/13D0604P.pdf
Here’s a news story that gives a fairly comprehensible (if somewhat biased) account of the judge’s ruling:
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