Parties: A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney Gen. of Mass.
Date: 1966-03-21
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Paragraph: 28 - The Constitution forbids abridgment of 'freedom of speech, or of the press.' Censorship is the most notorious form of abridgment. It substitutes majority rule where minority tastes or viewpoints were to be tolerated.
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Paragraph: 34 - 'Although I know whenever the great rights, the trial by jury, freedom of the press, or liberty of conscience, come in question in that body (Parliament), the invasion of them is resisted by able advocates, yet their Magna Charta does not contain any one provision for the security of those rights, respecting which the people of America are most alarmed. The freedom of the press and rights of conscience, those choicest privileges of the people, are unguarded in the British Constitution."
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Paragraph: 106 - To me it is plain, for instance, that Fanny Hill does not fall within this class and could not be barred from the federal mails. If further articulation is meaningful, I would characterize as 'hard-core' that prurient material that is patently offensive or whose indecency is self-demonstrating and I would describe it substantially as does Mr. Justice Stewart's opinion in Ginzburg, 383 U.S., p. 499, 86 S.Ct., p. 957. The Federal Government may be conceded a limited interest in excluding from the mails such gross pornography, almost universally condemned in this country. But I believe the dangers of national censorship and the existence of primary responsibility at the state level amply justify drawing the line at this point.
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Paragraph: 26 - I base my vote to reverse on my view that the First Amendment does not permit the censorship of expression not brigaded with illegal action.
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Paragraph: 28 - Four of the seven Justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court conclude that Fanny Hill is obscene. 349 Mass. 69, 206 N.E.2d 403. Four of the seven judges of the New York Court of Appeals conclude that it is not obscene. Larkin v. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 14 N.Y.2d 399, 252 N.Y.S.2d 71, 200 N.E.2d 760. To outlaw the book on such a voting record would be to let majorities rule where minorities were thought to be supreme. The Constitution forbids abridgment of 'freedom of speech, or of the press.' Censorship is the most notorious form of abridgment. It substitutes majority rule where minority tastes or viewpoints were to be tolerated.
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Paragraph: 37 - But the First Amendment, written in terms that are absolute, deprives the States of any power to pass on the value, the propriety, or the morality of a particular expression. Cf. Kingsley Int'l Pictures Corp. v. Regents of University, 360 U.S. 684, 688—689, 79 S.Ct. 1362, 1365—1366, 3 L.Ed.2d 1512; Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495, 72 S.Ct. 777, 96 L.Ed. 1098. Perhaps the most frequently assigned justication for censorship is the belief that erotica produce antisocial sexual conduct. But that relationship has yet to be proven. Indeed, if one were to make judgments on the basis of speculation, one might guess that literature of the most pornographic sort would, in many cases, provide a substitute—not a stimulus—for antisocial sexual conduct. See Murphy, The Value of Pornography, 10 Wayne L.Rev. 655, 661 and n. 19 (1964). As I read the First Amendment, judges cannot gear the literary diet of an entire nation to whatever tepid stuff is incapable of triggering the most demented mind. The First Amendment demands more than a horrible example or two of the perpetrator of a crime of sexual violence, in whose pocket is found a pornographic book, before it allows the Nation to be saddled with a regime of censorship.
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Phrase match: assigned justication for censorship is the belief
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