First Amendment: Revenge porn bills introduced in California legislature

California legislators are proposing laws to strengthen already existing state laws criminalizing revenge porn. The proposals would streamline the process of trying cases; allow law enforcement to seize revenge porn images with search warrants; subject porn images to destruction; and make it clear that it is unlawful to post personal photographs with identifying information without consent. (Valley Online News, March 3, 2015)

The laws are aimed deter cyber exploitation, the publication of intimate images without the consent of the subject, devastating to victims, humiliating them and hurting their social lives and ability to earn a living. (Courthouse News Service, March 3, 2015, by Elizabeth Warmerdam)

To protect the First Amendment, the current U.S. Supreme Court has made some tough decisions, notably allowing the Kansas Westboro Baptist Church to conduct protests outside military funerals and some legal experts believe the revenge porn images would be granted similar protection. (Business Insider, October 1, 2013, by Erin Fuchs)

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, The Volokh Conspiracy, April 210, 2013, thinks the revenge porn laws would survive a court challenge on First Amendment grounds. He cites precedents that uphold bans on narrowly limited classes of speech that could conceivably include “nonconsensual depictions of nudity.” He writes that the courts are unlikely to find porn revenge images qualify as content of “legitimate public concern.”