The denial was just one of a just-issued list of orders in
pending cases from the Supreme Court. In January a US Circuit Court
of Appeals had upheld a lower court's decision that the US courts
had no jurisdiction to rule in the case.
The legal tussle extends back to 2000 when two French groups,
L'Union des Etudiants Juifs de France (Union of Jewish Students in
France ) and La Ligue Contre le Racisme et l'Antisemitisme (League
Against Racism and Anti-Semitism), took Yahoo! to court over the
sale of Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo.com. The sale of Nazi-related
items is illegal in France and though Yahoo! had ensured that no
items were for sale on French site Yahoo.fr, the case was brought
because French citizens could still access the Yahoo.com site.
Yahoo!'s central claim is that US courts should be able to
uphold its First Amendment rights to free speech in resisting any
ban on Nazi-related items. It argued, from a California federal
court upwards, that the French court order to remove all items from
the yahoo.com domain undermined its right to free speech. That
deserved US constitutional protection because it would affect the
company's US operations and users, it argued.
That claim was at first upheld, but two successive appeals
courts ruled that the courts had no jurisdiction to hear the case.
Some of the judges involved argued that the US would only have
jurisdiction if France attempted to enforce its court order on US
soil.
The denial of court time means that the core issue of whether or
not the French court order affects Yahoo!'s rights to free speech
under the US Constitution has only been considered by the first
court to hear the case, the US District Court for the Northern
District of California in San Jose. The subsequent courts did not
consider that issue, ruling first that they did not have
jurisdiction to hear the case.
