Court Deals Blow to U.S. Anti-Porn Campaign

"If the First Amendment means anything," Justice Thurgood Marshall said in the 1969 majority decision, "it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch."

The other case was Lawrence vs. Texas, which conservatives warned at the time would have much more far-reaching implications than just the Texas anti-sodomy law.

"The nation's obscenity laws cannot stand in light of Lawrence," Lancaster wrote.

Though Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia offered a dissenting opinion in Lawrence vs. Texas, in which they argued for a state's ability to establish a "moral code" of conduct, they were in the minority. The Lawrence decision, Lancaster wrote, "can be reasonably interpreted as holding that public morality is not a legitimate state interest sufficient to justify infringing on adult, private, consensual, sexual conduct even if that conduct is deemed offensive to the general public's sense of morality."

Lancaster also found that federal anti-obscenity laws were drafted too broadly. Kaufman argued that the government's stated interest was to prevent minors and unwitting adults from being exposed to obscene materials. But Lancaster concluded that applied to the Extreme Associates case, "the federal obscenity statutes violate the constitutional guarantees of personal liberty and privacy of consenting adults who wish to view defendants' films in private."

Children and unwitting adults are adequately protected from the materials, Lancaster ruled. To receive them, one would have to access the defendants' Web site and join the members-only section, which requires a name, address and credit card.

"[O]nly those individuals who want to see defendants' films, indeed, want to see them badly enough that they are willing to pay to see them, are able to do so," Lancaster said.

There are adequate protections for children out there currently, he said, with software available for parents and schools to keep children off such Web sites, and the Federal Communications Commission judging that requiring payment by credit cards effectively restricts minors' access to porn phone lines, since such cards are not generally issued to minors.

Justice Department officials said they were reviewing the ruling and had no further comment beyond Buchanan's written statement.

ABC News' Jason A. Ryan and Rebecca Bershadker Kennedy contributed to this report.