Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Although lower courts in the U.S. had used the Hicklin standard sporadically since 1868, it was not until 1879, when prominent federal judge Samuel Blatchford upheld the obscenity conviction of D. M. Bennett using the Hicklin test, that the constitutionality of the Comstock Law became firmly established. [6] In Rosen v. United States (1896 ...
While an earlier version did exist, as Sec. 5. of the Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, [3] the modern version was initially enacted under Sec. 305. of the Tariff Act of 1930 and is currently codified (in a non-positive law title) at section 1305 of title 19, United States ...
In 1969, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Stanley v. Georgia that people could view whatever they wished in the privacy of their own homes. In response, the United States Congress funded the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, set up by President Lyndon B. Johnson to study pornography.
Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957), along with its companion case Alberts v.California, was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States which redefined the constitutional test for determining what constitutes obscene material unprotected by the First Amendment. [1]
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. [1] [2]
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.
Copies of the literary journal The Little Review containing episodes from James Joyce's novel Ulysses were seized by the United States Postal Service under the Comstock law. [77] Ulysses was suppressed in 1921 for obscenity , because of a scene that involved masturbation, first published in The Little Review . [ 78 ]
Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413 (1966), was the United States Supreme Court decision that attempted to clarify a holding regarding obscenity made a decade earlier in Roth v. United States (1957). The Roth ruling established that for a work of literature to be considered obscene, it had to be proven by censors to: 1) appeal to prurient interest, 2 ...