Word: roth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Harried Justices. What the Justices were really bothered by was the court's difficult decision in Roth v. U.S. (1957), which held for the first time that obscenity is not protected by First Amendment guarantees of free speech. In Roth, which upheld a federal antiobscenity statute, the court classified obscenity as a kind of "non-speech" -no longer protected by the familiar test that bars only those words that carry a "clear and present danger" of inciting anti-social conduct. Roth also carefully declared: "Sex and obscenity are not synonymous." And in later cases, the court refused to censor...
Applying those painfully honed tests soon forced the nine harried Justices (average age: 64) to read shelves of allegedly dirty books. But though the court has accepted at least half a dozen obscenity cases since the Roth decision, it was unable to find a single piece of writing obscene. Meanwhile, the nation's smut peddlers flourished. For what Roth overlooked was the fact that "obscenity" may depend less on the material than on how the seller uses...
Conduct v. Thought. Having reached exactly that conclusion, Justice Brennan last week tried to push the Roth decision, which he also wrote, far closer to a manageable test of conduct rather than thought. At issue in the Ginzburg case were Eros, whose chef-d'oeuvre in the disputed edition was a color portfolio of a white woman and Negro man, both naked, in multiple embraces; Liaison, a sex-front "newsletter" that was a compendium of sex jokes; and The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity, a Tucson woman's clinical account of her increased pleasure with unconventional...
...Rules. In the second case, New York Pornographer Edward Mishkin argued that his books were not legally obscene because they excited only sick rather than normal people. Brennan agreed-and duly "adjusted" Roth's prurient-appeal standard from the "average adult" to the average members of any "probable recipient group," including sadists and masochists...
...ROTH...