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Courts Are Choosing TikTok Over Children
A group of tech giants argue that the First Amendment entitles them to spy on kids. Unbelievably, it’s working.
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Some court decisions are bad; others are abysmal. The bad ones merely misapply the law; abysmal decisions go a step further and elevate abstract principle over democratic will and basic morality. The latter’s flaw is less about legal error and more about “a judicial system gone wrong,” as the legal scholar Gerard Magliocca once put it. A case such as Hammer v. Dagenhart exemplifies the abysmal: The case, decided in 1918, struck down child-labor laws during an era of public outcry and concern about children working as long as 70 hours a week in dangerous jobs. Making it truly wretched was the Dagenhart court’s reliance on a dubious constitutional distinction to allow federal regulation of “evil” activities such as the lottery, prostitution, and the sale of alcohol but not of the employment of children.
In our times, some of the leading candidates for the “abysmal” category are the extraordinarily out-of-touch decisions striking down laws protecting children from social-media harms. . ."
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He formerly worked at the White House and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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