19571776 Club
Brennan writes for a 6–3 Court: obscenity is not speech, but a Victorian test dies with it
Roth v. United States scraps the 1868 Hicklin standard; a work must now be judged whole, by its effect on the average person, not its worst passage on a child.
For nearly ninety years, American courts had used a Victorian English standard — drawn from an 1868 British case, Regina v. Hicklin — to ban books by Balzac, Flaubert, Joyce, and Lawrence based on isolated passages and their theoretical effect on children. In 1957, the Supreme Court finally swept that test away. Justice William J. Brennan Jr., writing for a 6–3 Court in Roth v. United States, held that obscenity fell outside First Amendment protection — but redefined it sharply, requiring that a work's dominant theme, taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest of the average person applying contemporary community standards. The ruling loosened obscenity law and tightened it at once, satisfying almost no one…
