Although one might not ordinarily think to associate child
pornography and pollution, the two were linked at an oral argument yesterday before the United
States Supreme Court. Specifically, in a child pornography case,
the defendant was found guilty of viewing a child pornography
video obtained from the Internet. Pursuant to federal statute, the defendant was ordered to
make "restitution" in the amount of $3.4 million to the
juvenile depicted in the video.
In arguments that will sound familiar to any environmental
lawyer, the defendant's counsel insisted that there had been
thousands of views of the video so it would be unfair for the
defendant to have to pay 100% of the victim's harm or
perhaps any of the harm since it was not possible to know what harm
any individual viewer of the video had caused. The
victim's counsel said that Congress had mandated restitution of
"the full amount of the victim's losses".
Citing CERCLA, the lawyer claimed that Congress had
