312
Opinion of Souter, J.
In Turner I, for example, we stated that
"[w]hen the Government defends a regulation on speech as a means to redress past harms or prevent anticipated harms, it must do more than simply 'posit the existence of the disease sought to be cured.' Quincy Cable TV, Inc. v. FCC, 768 F. 2d 1434, 1455 (CADC 1985). It must demonstrate that the recited harms are real, not merely conjectural, and that the regulation will in fact alleviate these harms in a direct and material way." Id., at 664 (plurality opinion).
The plurality concluded there, of course, that the record, though swollen by three years of hearings on the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, was insufficient to permit the necessary determinations and remanded for a more thorough factual development. When the case came back to us, in Turner II, a majority of the Court reiterated those requirements, characterizing the enquiry into the acceptability of the Government's regulations as one that turned on whether they "were designed to address a real harm, and whether those provisions will alleviate it in a material way." 520 U. S., at 195. Most recently, in Nixon, we repeated that "[w]e have never accepted mere conjecture as adequate to carry a First Amendment burden," 528 U. S., at 392, and we examined the "evidence introduced into the record by petitioners or cited by the lower courts in this action . . . ," id., at 393.
The focus on evidence appearing in the record is consistent with the approach earlier applied in Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U. S. 50 (1976), and Renton v. Playtime Theatres, Inc., 475 U. S. 41 (1986). In Young, Detroit adopted a zoning ordinance requiring dispersal of adult theaters through the city and prohibiting them within 500 feet of a residential area. Urban planners and real estate experts attested to the harms created by clusters of such theaters, see 427 U. S., at 55, and we found that "[t]he record
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