Court Opinion

ID: 9430949
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:30:59.445134+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:26.438616
License: Public Domain

Justice Blackmun,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I join Part I of Justice Stevens’ dissenting opinion for I agree with him that “harmless error” analysis may not appropriately be applied to this case. I join Parts I and II of Justice White’s opinion for the Court (but not the Court’s judgment remanding the case for harmless-error analysis), *506however, because I believe the standard enunciated in those Parts of that opinion meets the other concerns voiced by the dissent. Justice White points out: “Just as the ideas a work represents need not obtain majority approval to merit protection, neither, insofar as the First Amendment is concerned, does the value of the work vary from community to community based on the degree of local acceptance it has won.” Ante, at 500. Justice White further emphasizes: “Of course . . . the mere fact that only a minority of a population may believe a work has serious value does not mean the ‘reasonable person’ standard would not be met.” Ante, at 501, n. 3. Thus, contrary to the dissent’s characterization, I do not think that “[a] juror asked to create a ‘reasonable person’ in order to apply the standard that the Court announces today might well believe that the majority of the population who find no value in such a book are more reasonable than the minority who do find value.” Post, at 512. Rather, the Court’s opinion stands for the clear proposition that the First Amendment does not permit a majority to dictate to discrete segments of the population — be they composed of art critics, literary scholars, or scientists — the value that may be found in various pieces of work. That only a minority may find value in a work does not mean that a jury would not conclude that “a reasonable person would find such value in the material, taken as a whole.” Ante, at 501. Reasonable people certainly may differ as to what constitutes literary or artistic merit. See ante, at 504 (Scalia, J., concurring). As I believe Justice Scalia recognizes in his concurrence (although he may not applaud it), the Court’s opinion today envisións that even a minority view among reasonable people that a work has value may protect that work from being judged “obscene.”