History
Prior to the Stanley case, the prevailing precedent was that of Roth v. United States, where obscene material was determined to be unprotected by the First Amendment right to speech. In Roth, the defendant sent lewd advertisements by mail and sold American Aphrodite, a magazine containing erotica and pornography. A California court convicted him under state law, and when Roth appealed the decision, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction. In the majority decision, written by Justice Brenann, a new test was created for determining what can be considered obscene (The Hicklin test was used since a ruling in 1857, which the Court abandoned in Roth.) By 1960, the sexual revolution was in full swing in the US, and newly defined social norms clashed with the established statutory and common law of the country. Since the ruling in Roth in 1957, many cases in state and federal courts were determined using the case as primary justification.
Read more about this topic: Stanley V. Georgia
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Don’t give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can’t express them. Don’t analyse yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)