| Miller v. California |
Supreme Court of the United States | Argued January 18 – 19, 1972
Reargued November 7, 1972
Decided June 21, 1973
| | | Full case name: | Marvin Miller v. State of California | | | | Citations: | 413 U.S. 15; 93 S. Ct. 2607; 37 L. Ed. 2d 419; 1973 U.S. LEXIS 149; 1 Media L. Rep. 1441 | | | | Prior history: | Summary affirmation of jury verdict by Appellate Department, Superior Court of California, County of Orange, was unpublished. | | | | Holding | | Obscene materials are defined as those that the average person, applying contemporary community standards, find, taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest; that depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law; and that, taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. | | Court membership | Chief Justice: Warren E. Burger
Associate Justices: William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan, Potter Stewart, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr., William Rehnquist | | Case opinions | Majority by: Burger
Joined by: White, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist
Dissent by: Douglas
Dissent by: Brennan
Joined by: Stewart, Marshall
| | Laws applied | | U.S. Const. amend. I; Cal. Penal Code 311.2(a) | Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) was an important United States Supreme Court case involving what constitutes unprotected obscenity for First Amendment purposes. The decision reiterated that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment and established the Miller test for determining what constituted obscene material. Image File history File links Seal_of_the_United_States_Supreme_Court. ...
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest judicial body in the United States and is the only part of the judicial branch of the United States federal government explicitly specified in the United States Constitution. ...
Warren Earl Burger (September 17, 1907 – June 25, 1995) was Chief Justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986. ...
William Orville Douglas (October 16, 1898 – January 19, 1980) was a United States Supreme Court Associate Justice. ...
William J. Brennan, official portrait, 1976. ...
Justice Potter Stewart Potter Stewart (January 23, 1915 – December 7, 1985) was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. ...
Byron White, official portrait. ...
Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American jurist and the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. ...
Justice Harry Blackmun Harry Andrew Blackmun (November 12, 1908 – March 4, 1999) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1994. ...
Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. ...
William Hubbs Rehnquist (October 1, 1924 – September 3, 2005) was an American lawyer, jurist, and a political figure, who served as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States and later as the Chief Justice of the United States. ...
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is a part of the United States Bill of Rights. ...
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest judicial body in the United States and is the only part of the judicial branch of the United States federal government explicitly specified in the United States Constitution. ...
The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ...
The first ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution make up the Bill of Rights. ...
The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ...
The Miller test is the United States Supreme Courts test for determining whether speech or expression can be labeled obscene, in which case it is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and can be prohibited. ...
History
The appellant, Marvin Miller, operator of one of the West Coast's largest mail-order businesses dealing in sexually explicit material, had conducted a mass mailing campaign to advertise the sale of illustrated books, called "adult" material, euphemistically. He was found guilty by a California state court of having violated California Penal Code 311.2 (a), a misdemeanor, by knowingly distributing obscene material. The conviction was affirmed by the Court of Appeals of California upon appeal. As stated in the preface to Chief Justice Warren Burger's majority opinion, the "Appellant's conviction was specifically based on his conduct in causing five unsolicited advertising brochures to be sent through the mail in an envelope addressed to a restaurant in Newport Beach, California. The envelope was opened by the manager of the restaurant and his mother. They had not requested the brochures and complained to the police." In law, an appellant is the party who after eating a vagina, having lost their claim in a lower court decision, is appealing to a higher court to have their case reconsidered. ...
In mathematics, an operator is a function that performs some sort of operation on a number, variable, or function. ...
Regional definitions vary from source to source. ...
The cover of the first Eatons catalog, published in 1884. ...
Wall Street, Manhattan is the location of the New York Stock Exchange and is often used as a symbol for the world of business. ...
Look up Sex in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
If something is explicit, it generally leaves nothing to the imagination. ...
There are several common types of campaign: For organized efforts, each toward specific political goals, see political campaign. ...
Generally speaking, advertising is the paid promotion of goods, services, companies and ideas by an identified sponsor. ...
Official language(s) English Capital Sacramento Largest city Los Angeles Area Ranked 3rd - Total 158,302 sq mi (410,000 km²) - Width 250 miles (400 km) - Length 770 miles (1,240 km) - % water 4. ...
A trial at the Old Bailey in London as drawn by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin for Ackermanns Microcosm of London (1808-11). ...
The California Penal Code forms the basis for the application of criminal law in the American state of California. ...
A misdemeanors (or misdemeanour), in many common law legal systems, is a lesser criminal act. ...
Obscenity has several connotations. ...
The Chief Justice of the United States is the head of the judicial branch of the government of the United States, and presides over the Supreme Court of the United States. ...
Warren Burger at a press conference in May 1969 shortly after he was nominated to be Chief Justice of the United States. ...
Location of Newport Beach within Orange County, California. ...
According to the Court's decision, the materials in question primarily... consist[ed] of pictures and drawings very explicitly depicting men and women in groups of two or more engaging in a variety of sexual activities, with genitals often prominently displayed. Since the Court's decision in Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957), the Court had struggled to define what constituted constitutionally unprotected obscene material. Under the common law rule that prevailed before Roth, articulated most famously in the 1868 English case Hicklin v. Regina, any material that tended to "deprive and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was deemed "obscene" and could be banned on that basis. Thus, works by Balzac, Flaubert, James Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence were banned based on isolated passages and the effect they might have on children. Roth repudiated the Hicklin test and defined obscenity more strictly, as material whose "dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest" to the "average person, applying contemporary community standards." Only material meeting this test could be banned as "obscene." A sex organ, or primary sexual characteristic, narrowly defined, is any of those parts of the body (which are not always bodily organs according to the strict definition) which are involved in sexual reproduction and constitute the reproductive system in an complex organism; namely: Male: penis (notably the glans penis...
Roth v. ...
1957 (MCMLVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Irish Seamus Seoighe; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish writer and poet, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. ...
D. H. Lawrence David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was one of the most important, certainly one of the most controversial, English writers of the 20th century, who wrote novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. ...
Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, First Amendment "literalists," chafed at the Roth test and argued vigorously that the First Amendment protected obscene material. In subsequent cases the Court encountered tremendous difficulty in applying the Roth test, which did not define what it meant by "community standards." For example, in the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio, involving whether Ohio could ban the showing of a French film called Les Amants (The Lovers), the Court ruled that the film was protected by the First Amendment, but could not agree as to a rationale, yielding four different opinions from the majority, with none garnering the support of more than two justices, as well as two dissenting opinions. In his concurring opinion in Jacobellis, Justice Potter Stewart, holding that Roth protected all obscenity except "hard-core pornography," famously wrote, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." Hugo Black Hugo LaFayette Black (February 27, 1886 – September 25, 1971) was a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1937 - 1971). ...
William Orville Douglas (October 16, 1898 – January 19, 1980) was a United States Supreme Court Associate Justice. ...
Holding The First Amendment, as applied through the Fourteenth, protected a movie theatre manager from being prosecuted for possessing and showing a film that was not obscene. ...
Les Amants is a 1958 French film directed by Louis Malle and starring Jeanne Moreau. ...
Justice Potter Stewart Potter Stewart (January 23, 1915 – December 7, 1985) was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. ...
In Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413 (1966), a plurality of the Court further redefined the Roth test by holding unprotected only that which is "patently offensive" and "utterly without redeeming social value," but no opinion in that case could command a majority of the Court either, and the state of the law in the obscenity field remained confused. Memoirs v. ...
1966 (MCMLXVI) was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1966 calendar). ...
With the Court unable to agree as to what constituted obscenity, the Justices were put in the position of having to personally review almost every obscenity prosecution in the U. S. with the Justices gathering for weekly screenings of "obscene" motion pictures (Black and Douglas pointedly refused to participate, believing all the material protected). Meanwhile, pornography and sexually oriented publications proliferated as a result of the Court's holdings, the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s flowered, and pressure increasingly came to the Court to allow leeway for state and local governments to crack down on obscenity. During his ill-fated bid to become Chief Justice, Justice Abe Fortas was attacked vigorously in Congress by conservatives such as Strom Thurmond for siding with the Warren Court majority in liberalizing protection for pornography. In his 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon campaigned against the Warren Court, pledging to appoint "strict constructionists" to the Supreme Court. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
Abe Fortas Abraham Fortas (June 19, 1910 - April 5, 1982) was a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice. ...
James Strom Thurmond (December 5, 1902 – June 26, 2003) represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 to April 1956 and November 1956 to 1964 as a Democrat and from 1964 to 2003 as a Republican. ...
Chief Justice Warren Burger came to the Court in 1969 believing that the Court's obscenity jurisprudence was misguided and governments should be given more leeway to ban obscene materials. In consideration of Miller in May and June 1972, Burger pushed successfully for a looser definition of "obscenity" which would allow local prosecutions, while Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., who by now also believed the Roth and Memoirs tests should be abandoned, led the charge for protecting all "obscenity" unless distributed to minors or exposed offensively to unconsenting adults. Decision of the case was contentious, and Miller was put over for reargument for October term 1973, and did not come down until June of 1973, with Burger prevailing by a bare 5-4 vote. Warren Burger at a press conference in May 1969 shortly after he was nominated to be Chief Justice of the United States. ...
William Joseph Brennan (April 25, 1906 - July 24, 1997) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. ...
The case The question that the court had to decide was, is the sale and distribution of obscene materials by mail protected under the First Amendment's freedom of speech guarantee? The Court ruled that it was not. It indicated that "obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment", thereby reaffirming part of Roth.
However, the Court acknowledged "the inherent dangers of undertaking to regulate any form of expression," and said that "State statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited." The Court, in an attempt to set such limits devised a set of three criteria which must be met in order for a work to be legitimately subject to state regulation:
- the average person, applying contemporary community standards (not national standards, as some prior tests required), must find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
- the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions[1] specifically defined by applicable state law; and
- the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
The third condition is also known as the "SLAPS test". The work is considered obscene only if all three conditions, which together constitute the Miller test, are satisfied. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
ART is a three-letter acronym that can mean: Adaptive resonance theory Arlington Transit, a bus service that serves Arlington County, Virginia Advanced Rapid Transit metro technology assisted reproductive technology Anaheim Resort Transit Watertown International Airport (IATA airport code: ART) ISO 639 alpha-3 code for otherwise unassigned artificial languages...
Politics is the process by which groups make decisions. ...
yt dftj cgh cjhgScience in the broadest sense refers to any system of knowledge attained by verifiable means. ...
The Miller test is the United States Supreme Courts test for determining whether speech or expression can be labeled obscene, in which case it is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and can be prohibited. ...
This obscenity test overturns the definition of obscenity set out in the Memoirs decision, which held that "all ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance . . . have the full protection of the guaranties [of the First Amendment]" and that obscenity was that which was "utterly without redeeming social importance."
The Miller decision vacated the judgment of the Appellate Department of the Superior Court of California and remanded the case to that court for further proceedings consistent with the First Amendment standards established by the opinion.
- ^ The syllabus of the case mentions only sexual conduct, but excretory functions are explicitly mentioned on page 25 of the majority opinion.
Effects of the decision Miller provided states greater freedom in prosecuting alleged surveyors of obscene material because, for the first time since Roth, a majority of the Court agreed on a definition of "obscenity." Hundreds of obscenity prosecutions went forward after Miller, and the Supreme Court began denying review of these state actions after years of reviewing many obscenity convictions (over 60 appeared on the Court's docket for the 1971-1972 term, pre-Miller). A companion case to Miller, Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, provided states with greater leeway to shut down adult movie houses. Controversy arose over Miller's "community standards" analysis, with critics charging that Miller encouraged "forum shopping" to prosecute national obscenity producers in locales with more restrictive obscenity laws.
In the years since Miller, many localities have cracked down on adult theatres and bookstores, as well as nude dancing, through restrictive zoning ordinances and public nudity laws. These types of actions have been upheld by the Supreme Court. Additionally, in 1982's New York v. Ferber, the Court declared child pornography unprotected by the First Amendment, upholding the state of New York's ban on that material. In the recent Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition case, the Court, however, held that sexually explicit material that appears to depict minors might be constitutionally protected. New York v. ...
Ashcroft vs. ...
Research resources
See also This is a chronological list of notable cases decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. ...
There have been a number of cases decided by the United States Supreme Court or by the courts of the various states regarding pornography, sexual activity and what consenting adults are allowed to do in the privacy of their homes (or sometimes, in other places). ...
External links - Text of the decision and dissents, from findlaw.com
- Audio recordings or oral arguments and rearguments, from Oyez.org
|
Feeds |
Contact