Court Opinion

ID: 9424992
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:13:23.349874+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:53.015331
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
concurring in the judgment.
I concur in the judgment because neither logic, history, nor the plain meaning of the English language will support the obscenity exception this Court has engrafted onto the First Amendment.
This case, moreover, is further testimony to the morass in which this Court has placed itself in the area of obscenity. Men are sent to prison under definitions which they cannot understand, and on which lower courts and members of this Court cannot agree. Here, the Court is forced to examine the thematic content of the two newspapers for the publication of which petitioner was prosecuted in order to hold that they are constitutionally protected. Highly subjective inquiries such as this do not lend themselves to a workable or predictable rule of law, nor should they be the basis of fines or imprisonment.
In this case, the vague umbrella of obscenity laws was used in an attempt to run a radical newspaper out of *233business and to impose a two-year sentence and a $2,000 fine upon its publisher. If obscenity laws continue in this uneven and uncertain enforcement, then the vehicle has been found for the suppression of any unpopular tract. The guarantee of free expression will thus be diluted and in its stead public discourse will only embrace that which has the approval of five members of this Court.
The prospect is not imaginary now that the Bill of Rights, applicable to the States by reason of the Fourteenth Amendment, is coming to be a “watered down” version, meaning not what it says but only what a majority of this Court thinks fit and proper.