Yahoo!, Inc. v. La Ligue Contre Le Racisme et L'Antisemitisme

Yahoo! (plaintiff) allowed Nazi memorabilia to be auctioned on Yahoo.com, accessible to users in France. Two French advocacy organizations, LICRA and UEJF (defendants), sued Yahoo in France and won an order requiring Yahoo to block French users from the Nazi-related content. Yahoo could not technically limit access by country, so it instead banned auctioning Nazi-glorifying items sitewide while still permitting expressive items like books and media; some Nazi items nonetheless kept appearing. Yahoo then sued in a U.S. federal court, seeking a declaration that the French order was unenforceable in the United States because complying fully would require it to remove content protected by the First Amendment.

Whether a foreign state may regulate constitutionally protected speech in the United States on the ground that the speech violates the foreign state's own law.