Court Opinion

ID: 9459281
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:16:17.101346+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:05.987506
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
Judge Thornberry’s opinion is an excellent and absolutely accurate summation of the law as announced by present federal court decisions fixing (or more aptly, failing to fix) the respective limits of “free press” rights under the First Amendment and unprotected publications which exploit sexuality. However, as his opinion convincingly demonstrates, the judiciary has created a quagmire. Our recognition that a jury must have the opinion evidence of obscenity “experts” may very well compound, rather than aiding in solving, the dilemma.1
If I were not bound by these mutable precedents, I would unhesitatingly abandon the “national standard” concept and return the problem of what is unprotected hard-core prurience to the fifty individual laboratories — the States— which make up our united republic, with every confidence that they will protect federal Constitutional guarantees better than we. The chance that the traditional *560blue-nosed, puritanical Boston censor will ban a publication that ought to be protected, is far outweighed in my mind by the potential harm of the progeny which may follow a judicial foisting of the permissive licentiousness thought by some “expert” to be the majority standard elsewhere upon the citizens of that city.
One more observation and I am done. I understand that the First Amendment protects publications and talk and only limited forms of action. But, I cannot fathom the logic of a legalism that asserts that this Amendment, which became a part of our Constitution in 1790, was ever intended, then or now, to mean that the several States may punish a nude female dancer in a private club who climaxes her performance by exposing her sex organs for indecent exposure2 while at the same time protecting an entrepreneur who films the illegal scene and sells it to the adult public at the same club. If reason is really the life of the law, as I conceive it to be, both classes of action ought to be State responsibilities. That is one function the simultaneously proposed and ratified Tenth Amendment would perform if we would but let it.
Reluctantly, I concur.

. See our divided opinion in United States v. Williams, 447 F.2d 1285 (5th Cir. en banc 1971).

. See Hoffman v. Carson, 250 So.2d 891 (Fla.); Appeal dismissed for want of a substantial federal question, 404 U.S. 981, 92 S.Ct. 453, 30 L.Ed.2d 365 (1971).