COURT APPROVES WAY TO BLOCK DIAL-A-PORN WRITTEN-CONSENT RULE INTENDED TO

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, January 28, 1992                   TAG: 9201280109
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium
COURT APPROVES WAY TO BLOCK DIAL-A-PORN WRITTEN-CONSENT RULE INTENDED TO
Congress got word from the Supreme Court on Monday that it finally had succeeded in devising a constitutional way to keep children from calling "dial-a-porn" messages.
In a brief, unexplained order, the court refused to hear a constitutional challenge to a 1989 law aimed at blocking children's calls to sexually explicit message lines. The law demands written consent in advance before such a message can be played to a caller.
That law was Congress' third try; two earlier laws were struck down by lower courts or, in part, by the Supreme Court itself. This time the court did not even bother to review the newest law; it simply voted to leave intact a lower court decision upholding that law.
The court's action on the "dial-a-porn" law means that the Federal Communications Commission is now free to enforce the 1989 law. The FCC will act if it gets complaints from telephone customers demanding enforcement. The law has not been in effect since its passage.
In another significant action Monday, the court ruled 6-3 that Southern states and local governments may add to or cut back from the duties of elected officials, and they can even pass off some of their duties to appointed officials without first getting the federal government's approval under the Voting Rights Act.
The act applies mainly in the South to states or localities that formerly denied voting equality to blacks. If those governments alter procedures that may affect black voters, they must get the approval of the Department of Justice or of a special federal court before putting the changes into effect.
But in a decision that flatly rejected the view of the Bush administration and civil-rights lawyers, the court cut back significantly on the law's scope. It declared that the act does not apply to shifts in the decision-making power of state and local officials. Those shifts, it said, are not related directly to voting, and do not have an impact on voting.
The administration and civil-rights advocates had contended that transfers of decision-making power could interfere significantly with the rights of elected officials' black and other minority constituents.
The dissenting justices noted that this was the first time the court had ever rejected the federal government's view on the scope of the Voting Rights Act.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB