> Quoted, I am sure, in Beauharnais.
Quoted in a lot of cases.
> And a million other cases, Roth si still good law,
> more or less.
But Miller sets the current standard.
>
> No, you misundferstand the point of my citation, which
> is not to show that the Court here holds taht
> obscenity is unprotected -- they had decided that in
> the 1940s -- but to explain why and to defione what is
> obscene.
I didn't misunderstand, I just disagree that they're explaining WHY in this citation. I think they'd already explained it.
> I wasn't trying to give the whole standard but to
> locate what the Court thought was the harm in
> obscenity, which I take to be its tendency to excite
> lustful thoughts.
Yeah. But the point, I think, is that it isn't primarily the harm which makes it bannable, as is the case in the other three exceptions.
They would acknowledge that this same harm exists in pornographic material that isn't obscene. Where obscenity crosses the line is in being socially useless (according to them). I can't come up with any situation in which solicitation to murder - a genuine solicitation that is - would be excused on the grounds of literary value ("but, Your Honor, it made a good story!")
> Didn't used to be. In the 60s and early 70s there were
> tons of obscenity prosecutions.
How many were upheld?
> But I may misremember.
Or my professor could have been letting a good anecdote get in the way of the truth :)