Unhappy Anniversary: Fifty Years Since Roth V. United States

by Daniel Mark Cohen

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Summary

Unhappy anniversary. The year 2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Roth v. United States, the landmark case in which America's highest judicial body determined that "obscenity" is not protected by the Constitution, but that nothing is obscene unless a proxy representative of the community is moved to deem it so. Even more striking, as a necessary, underlying premise to the opinion, the Court tacitly endorsed an astounding that photographs of women engaged in acts of prostitution, absent fulfillment of an elusive legal standard, constitute a form of speech entitled to protection by the First Amendment. It is only now, fifty years later, with the astonishing invention of the Internet, the universal establishment of the personal computer, and daily, unimpeded access to the Internet by America's children, that one can begin to glimpse the apocalyptic consequences of the Supreme Court's woeful and spectacular misjudgment in Roth. The Supreme Court's ruling in 1957, and the legal progeny wrought therefrom, has precipitated a national spiritual decline in this country, subtle in form and glacial in pace to be sure, but inexorable, and one that, though undiscerned, threatens to bring about the collapse of these, the former United Colonies . . .

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