Fred Kaplan has written an interesting history of the legal case that struck down many of America’s obscenity laws, particularly the ability of the US Postal Service to confiscate items from the mail it deemed obscene. The case revolved around a publisher, Grove Press, that sued the Postal Service for confiscating copies of the D. H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover under the law that prevented the shipment of materials the Post Office deemed to be obscene, lewd, lustful, lascivious, or prurient. Previously, the Supreme Court had ruled that free speech, protected by the First Amendment, did not cover obscenity.
The interesting part of the case, for this website, was that the lawyer for Grove Press, Charles Rembar, used a Venn Diagram to point out the logical flaw in the current interpretation of the law. In the case Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957), Justice William Brennan wrote,
All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance – unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion – have the full protection of the guaranties, unless excludable because they encroach upon the limited area of more important interests; but implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.
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