Supreme Court Cases Dealing with Pornography

The Supreme Court has addressed pornography more often than almost any other issue of comparable specificity, and small wonder why—the Court has read an implicit obscenity exception to the free speech clause, giving it the unenviable responsibility of interpreting an unstated 18th-century definition of obscenity two centuries later. And the more the Court has attempted to define obscenity, the more complex that definition has become.The Supreme Court made things slightly easier for itself in three cases, all decided between 1967 and 1973.Jacobellis v. Ohio (1967)Forced to determine whether the art film Les Amants was obscene, despite the fact that it was obviously not intended to serve as pornography, the Court acknowledged the difficulty of its job—before ruling in favor of the film on multiple, vague grounds. Justice Potter Stewart memorably captured the Courts challenge: It is possible to read the Courts opinion in [past pornography cases] in a variety of ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which, in those cases, was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. I have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative implication in the Courts [recent decisions] that, under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. These are the rights that appellant is asserting in the case before us. He is asserting the right to read or observe what he pleases -- the right to satisfy his intellectual and emotional needs in the privacy of his own home. He is asserting the right to be free from state inquiry into the contents of his library. Georgia contends that appellant does not have these rights, that there are certain types of materials that the individual may not read or even possess. Georgia justifies this assertion by arguing that the films in the present case are obscene.But we think that mere categorization of these films as obscene is insufficient justification for such a drastic invasion of personal liberties guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Whatever may be the justifications for other statutes regulating obscenity, we do not think they reach into the privacy of ones own home. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control mens minds. The difficulty is that we do not deal with constitutional terms, since obscenity is not mentioned in the Constitution or Bill of Rights †¦ for there was no recognized exception to the free press at the time the Bill of Rights was adopted which treated obscene publications differently from other types of papers, magazines, and books †¦ What shocks me may be sustenance for my neighbor. What causes one person to boil up in rage over one pamphlet or movie may reflect only his neurosis, not shared by others. We deal here with a regime of censorship which, if adopted, should be done by constitutional amendment after full debate by the people.Obscenity cases usually generate tremendous emotional outbursts. They have no business being in the courts. If a constitutional amendment authorized censorship, the censor would probably be an administrative agency. Then criminal prosecutions could follow as, if, and when publishers defied the censor and sold their literature. Under that regi me, a publisher would know when he was on dangerous ground. Under the present regime -- whether the old standards or the new ones are used -- the criminal law becomes a trap. In practice, all but the most harmful and exploitative forms of pornography have generally been decriminalized despite the Courts relative lack of clarity on this issue.