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The Miller test, also called the three-prong obscenity test, is the United States Supreme Court's test for determining whether speech or expression can be labeled obscene, in which case it is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and can be prohibited.
However, the legislation did not define "obscenity", which was left to the courts to determine on a case-by-case basis. In the United States, the suppression or limitation of what is defined as obscenity raises issues of freedom of speech and of the press, both of which are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court clarifying the legal definition of obscenity as material that lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value". [1]
The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio. [1] [2] In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored, Stewart wrote:
The court drew a sharp distinction between speech that meets the legal definition of "obscene" and speech that is "indecent" (sexually charged but not rising to the level of "obscene"). The court held that obscene speech could be restricted, but that merely indecent speech was protected by the First Amendment. The court also recognized a real ...
The government is not permitted to fire an employee based on the employee's speech if three criteria are met: the speech addresses a matter of public concern; the speech is not made pursuant to the employee's job duties, but rather the speech is made in the employee's capacity as a citizen; [47] and the damage inflicted on the government by the ...
California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the word "fuck", although almost universally considered obscene when used to describe sexual intercourse, is speech-protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution when used to express a political belief. On 26 April 1968, Paul Robert Cohen, then 19 years old ...
The First Amendment puts protection for expressive content in terms that are both sweeping and absolute: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" [2] Despite this broad protection, the roots of U.S. attempts to legally suppress obscenity extend back to the English common law offense of obscene libel and censorship of stage plays by the Master of the Revels.