Eastern United States

“ The unbounded confidence in the material development of the country which now characterizes the extreme northwest of the United States prevailed as strongly throughout the eastern part of the Union during the first thirty years of the century ”

“ Although peace is preserved with those Indians, yet their position and claims tend essentially to interrupt the intercourse between the eastern and western parts of the Territory, on which our inhabitants are principally settled. It is essential to the growth and prosperity of the Territory, as well as to the interests of the Union, that those Indians should be removed, by special compact with them, to some other position or concentration within narrower limits where they are. ”

“ So far as my own knowledge of that country goes, I believe the citizens look with indignation at the power which foreigners have over their commerce. So far from being jealous of the Eastern States, they look forward to some future day when their navigation will be secured to that part of the Union. They know that it possesses superior maritime advantages, and expect they will hereafter afford security to them. They know, that from the spirit and industry of the people of New England, they may derive commercial and agricultural benefits. ”

“ Another advantage of far greater importance was the encouragement offered by the roads to the rapid settlement of the regions through which they passed. The new Western states increased in population with amazing rapidity, partly from foreign immigration, and partly from the migration of people from the Eastern states. By the census of 1870 it was found that more than a million inhabitants had already settled along the transcontinental lines. The Pacific states now for the first time seemed to be an integral part of the Union. ”

“ The large towns of the Northwest are notable for the great numbers of the brightest and most energetic of the young business and professional men of the East that they contain. While they lack the leisure class and the traditions of culture that belong to older communities, they may justly claim a far higher percentage of college-bred men and of families of cultivated tastes than belong to Eastern towns of like population. The intense pressure of business and absorption of private pursuits are, for the present, seeming obstacles to the progress of Western communities in the highest things ”

“ People in the West are apt to form an entirely erroneous impression of Eastern States. The word, "East," to them conveys an impression of dense population, overcrowding, and manufacturing activity. That there are thousands and thousands of acres of scenic grandeur, as well as farm lands, in some of the most crowded States, is not realized, and that this is the case will be news to many. ”

“ Two decades hence no man will question the quality of Northwestern civilization. If the East is losing something of its distinctive Americanism through the influx of foreign elements and the decay of its old-time farming communities, the growth of the Northwest, largely upon the basis of New England blood and New England ideas, will make full compensation. ”

“ After considerable discussion the government decided that as the United States made pretensions to the territory lying between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, they might venture to send a sub-Indian agent into the country to look after the intercourse between the natives and citizens of the United States. ”

“ The West is now turning a little back toward the East, and I have found some people, who probably had some ancestral connection with New England, but whose birth, early residence, and business life were in the West, who have come back to the old home. All this is pleasant, all this is surety of the future of our country. It is pleasant to know that the South is being obliterated, that all that made it distinctive in the sense of separation or alienation is being gradually wiped out. ”

“ The plain, if at times disquieting, truth is that in our pluralistic society, constantly proliferating new and ingenious forms of expression, we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes. Much that we encounter offends our esthetic, if not our political and moral, sensibilities. Nevertheless, the Constitution does not permit government to decide which types of otherwise protected speech are sufficiently offensive to require protection for the unwilling listener or viewer. ”

“ The government's interest in preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, or, in the case of minors, material harmful to minors, is well-established. Speech that is obscene, under the legal definition of obscenity set forth in the margin, is unprotected under the First Amendment, and accordingly the state has a compelling interest in preventing its distribution. ”

“ Towns and cities replaced crude settlements and provided secure bases from which to look out at the wonders of the land. The newly arrived settlers made the West their own. And, to compress time and events into a few words, some people began to think about protecting some of the uniqueness of the West. ”

“ The increasing emigration to Oregon and the care and protection which is due from the Government to its citizens in that distant region make it our duty, as it is our interest, to cultivate amicable relations with the Indian tribes of that Territory. ”

“ It has State universities, rivaling in conservative and scientific economic instruction those of any other part of the Union, and its citizens more often visit the East, than do Eastern men the West. As time goes on, its industrial development will bring it more into harmony with the East.
Moreover, the Old Northwest holds the balance of power, and is the battlefield on which these issues of American development are to be settled. It has more in common with all parts of the nation than has any other region. It understands the East, as the East does not understand the West. ”

“ In short, public libraries, by providing their patrons with access to the Internet, have created a public forum that provides any member of the public free access to information from millions of speakers around the world. The unique speech-enhancing character of Internet use in public libraries derives from the openness of the public library to any member of the public seeking to receive information, and the openness of the Internet to any member of the public who wishes to speak. ”

“ In particular, whereas the architecture of real space limits the audience of a pamphleteer or soapbox orator to people within the speaker's immediate vicinity, the Internet renders the geography of speaker and listener irrelevant: Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. Through the use of Web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same individual can become a pamphleteer. ”

“ Under the caption of The West, we arbitrarily are grouping all of the states lying west of a line running north and south from the western borders of the Dakotas to the eastern edge of New Mexico. This excludes part of that great region long known in America as the Great West,—a country that is no more, and never again can be on the face of this earth, unless war and pestilence one day shall quite remove our present human population. ”

“ Public libraries that provide Internet access greatly expand the educational opportunities for millions of Americans who, as explained in the margin, would otherwise be deprived of the benefits of this new medium.
Just as important as the openness of a forum to listeners is its openness to speakers. Parks and sidewalks are paradigmatic loci of First Amendment values in large part because they permit speakers to communicate with a wide audience at low cost. ”

“ But when the boundless resources that now lie hidden in its hills and mountains shall have become developed—when the vast plains shall have been settled—and towns, villages and farm houses arise in the lonely wilderness, and the teeming soil be cultivated—who then will be able to estimate the value of this great territory of the West? In ten years, the West will have a majority in the United States Congress; in a century, a large portion of it will contain a population as dense, perhaps, as that of the Atlantic States. ”

“ While it is thus quite simple to design a filter that does not overblock, and equally simple to design a filter that does not underblock, it is currently impossible, given the Internet's size, rate of growth, rate of change, and architecture, and given the state of the art of automated classification systems, to develop a filter that neither underblocks nor overblocks a substantial amount of speech. The more effective a filter is at blocking Web sites in a given category, the more the filter will necessarily overblock. ”

“ The court recognizes that the State of New York, its courts, its administrative agencies, and its municipal governments have the primary responsibility for protecting mothers and children. The State has largely delegated these duties to municipalities such as the City of New York. No part of the court's preliminary injunction was designed to interfere in the slightest with the jurisdiction of New York's Family Court or of any other court of New York. ”

“ This tradeoff between overblocking and underblocking also applies not just to automated classification systems, but also to filters that use only human review. Given the approximately two billion pages that exist on the Web, the 1.5 million new pages that are added daily, and the rate at which content on existing pages changes, if a filtering company blocks only those Web pages that have been reviewed by humans, it will be impossible, as a practical matter, to avoid vast amounts of underblocking. ”

“ Although several of the government's librarian witnesses who testified at trial purport to apply the same standards that govern the library's acquisition of print materials to the library's provision of Internet access to patrons, when public libraries provide their patrons with Internet access, they intentionally open their doors to vast amounts of speech that clearly lacks sufficient quality to ever be considered for the library's print collection. ”

“ The long sought River of the West was found, and by an American. The path of destiny for the new Republic of the West was made secure. Without Oregon we probably would not have acquired California, and without a Pacific Coast, the United States would inevitably have been but a second-class power, the prey to European intrigue. ”

“ A new element, moreover, has recently entered into the speculations and calculations concerning Oregon—the possibility that, while the United States and Great Britain are debating to whom it shall belong, the actual occupants of the country may claim it for themselves, and seek to establish there a great Pacific Republic—bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and yet not identified with us. ”

“ This extraordinary growth of the Internet illustrates the extent to which the Internet promotes First Amendment values in the same way that the historical use of traditional public fora for speaking, handbilling, and protesting testifies to their effectiveness as vehicles for free speech. ”

“ This force is not equally distributed throughout the country, the census of 1900 showing that the Northwest is in many respects the predominant section of the Union. But the Middle states and New England still retain their lead in matters of culture, and are very progressive, while the Pacific states have developed wonderfully, as also the South, whose future is full of promise. ”

“ Although neither the Supreme Court nor the Third Circuit has recognized a compelling state interest in shielding the sensibilities of unwilling viewers, beyond laws intended to preserve the privacy of individuals' homes or to protect captive audiences, we do not read the case law as categorically foreclosing recognition, in the public library setting, of the state's interest in protecting unwilling viewers. ”

“ I beg to say to you that whoever supposes that there is anywhere in the Northern States any jealousy of this great material progress which the South is making wholly misconceives the friendly heart of the people of the North. ”

“ Those who are acquainted with the Eastern States, the reason of their original migration, and their pursuits, habits, and principles, well know that they are essentially different from those of the Middle and Southern States; that they retain all those opinions respecting religion and government which first induced their ancestors to cross the Atlantic; and that they are, perhaps, more purely republican in habits and sentiment than any other part of the Union. ”

“ Application of Strict Scrutiny Having concluded that strict scrutiny applies to public libraries' content-based restrictions on patrons' access to speech on the Internet, we must next determine whether a public library's use of Internet software filters can survive strict scrutiny. To survive strict scrutiny, a restriction on speech "must be narrowly tailored to promote a compelling Government interest. If a less restrictive alternative would serve the Government's purpose, the legislature must use that alternative." ”

“ The line between the East and the West, advancing from the Alleghanies to the Rockies112 and then part of the way back, has never stayed long enough in one zone to be precisely drawn, but it has always been sharply felt. Since Colonial times the East has meant many things—wealth, stability, contacts with Europe, refinement, industry, centralized finance—and the West has meant many things—hardship and adventure, El Dorado, outlawry, self-reliance, agriculture, vast enterprise ”