Word: brennan
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WITHOUT LOVE, by Gerald Hanley (245 pp.; Harper; $3.50), has a theme that might be described as disgrace under pressure. Mike Brennan, the seedy son of a lace-curtain London-Irish family, is hanging around present-day Barcelona waiting to commit just one last political murder before he tells all to a priest. Like Britain's London-Irish William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), Brennan had fallen out of the church into Mosley's Blackshirts. Via the Nazi SS, he becomes, by double desertion, a journeyman executioner for Russia's secret police. Yet he is not a devoted...
...July 1 spread on "The Nine Justices" lists Baptist Warren, Baptist Black, Presbyterian Douglas, Unitarian Burton, Presbyterian Clark, Presbyterian Harlan, Roman Catholic Brennan, Methodist Whittaker and Indefatigable Felix Frankfurter. Is Justice Frankfurter a Northern, Southern, Missouri or United Indefatigable...
Just what is obscenity? The old test, said Brennan, allowed "material to be judged merely by the effect of an isolated excerpt upon particularly susceptible persons." That standard was rejected, and the Supreme Court instead approved this test: "Whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interests." Justice Brennan quoted with approval a lower court's charge to the jury: "You and you alone are the exclusive judges of what the common conscience of the community...
Chief Justice Earl Warren concurred in the result of the majority opinion, but fretted lest Brennan's "broad language" might "eventually be applied to the arts and sciences and freedom of communication generally." Justice William Douglas (joined by Justice Hugo Black) dissented, arguing that the majority test of obscenity made for "community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where, in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win." Wrote Douglas: "I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have...
Last week the Supreme Court also: Brennan dissented because the New York injunctive process provides no trial by jury. Dissenting Justice Douglas (with Black) wrote bitterly: "Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter." Wrote dissenting Chief Justice Warren...