The Law of Obscenity and Pornography

The Law of Obscenity and Pornography PDF Author: Margaret C. Jasper
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195386172
Category : Obscenity (Law)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From the Publisher: The law of obscenity has evolved considerably since the first cases appeared in the courts. Most of these legal changes are the direct result of shifts in industry and cultural standards. The advent of the computer has presented new and novel issues to be addressed, as it is a difficult medium to monitor and control. In this legal almanac, Margaret C. Jasper explores all of the laws surrounding obscenity and pornography. This second edition outlines the evolution of the relevant case law, including constitutional considerations and the various tests that the U.S. Supreme Court has devised to balance the regulation of obscenity and the First Amendment right to free expression. The author also discusses the status of the current law, including the most recent legislation affecting materials available through the Internet and various on-line services, and the government's attempt to restrict material that is harmful to minors. New tools designed to help parents who are concerned about the availability of harmful subject matter in the media, including program blocking devices and ratings systems developed by the motion picture, television, music and videogame industries are also addressed. Related issues, such as child pornography, the relationship between pornography and violence along with the regulation of broadcast media by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are included. A thorough Appendix provides resource directories, applicable statutes, and other pertinent information and data. The Glossary contains definitions of terms used throughout the almanac.

The Law of Obscenity and Pornography

The Law of Obscenity and Pornography PDF Author: Margaret C. Jasper
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195386172
Category : Obscenity (Law)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
From the Publisher: The law of obscenity has evolved considerably since the first cases appeared in the courts. Most of these legal changes are the direct result of shifts in industry and cultural standards. The advent of the computer has presented new and novel issues to be addressed, as it is a difficult medium to monitor and control. In this legal almanac, Margaret C. Jasper explores all of the laws surrounding obscenity and pornography. This second edition outlines the evolution of the relevant case law, including constitutional considerations and the various tests that the U.S. Supreme Court has devised to balance the regulation of obscenity and the First Amendment right to free expression. The author also discusses the status of the current law, including the most recent legislation affecting materials available through the Internet and various on-line services, and the government's attempt to restrict material that is harmful to minors. New tools designed to help parents who are concerned about the availability of harmful subject matter in the media, including program blocking devices and ratings systems developed by the motion picture, television, music and videogame industries are also addressed. Related issues, such as child pornography, the relationship between pornography and violence along with the regulation of broadcast media by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are included. A thorough Appendix provides resource directories, applicable statutes, and other pertinent information and data. The Glossary contains definitions of terms used throughout the almanac.

Obscenity Rules

Obscenity Rules PDF Author: Whitney Strub
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700619372
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
For some, he was “America’s leading smut king,” hauled into court repeatedly over thirty years for peddling obscene publications through the mail. But when Samuel Roth appealed a 1956 conviction, he forced the Supreme Court to finally come to grips with a problem that had plagued both American society and constitutional law for longer than he had been in business. For while the facts of Roth v. United States were unexceptional, its constitutional issues would define the relationship of obscenity to the First Amendment. The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in Roth for the first time tried to definitively rule on the issue of obscenity in American life and law—and failed. In this first book-length examination of the case, Whitney Strub lays out the history of obscenity’s meaning as a legal concept, highlights the influence of antivice crusaders like Anthony Comstock and John Sumner, and chronicles the shadowy career that led Roth to spend nearly a decade of his life imprisoned for the allegedly obscene materials that he sent through the mails. Strub then unwraps the events that produced Roth v. United States, placing the trial in the context of its times—the Kinsey Reports, the Kefauver hearings, free speech debates—by using Roth’s own private papers along with the records of the various prosecutions and the memos of the justices. The significance of Roth, as Strub reveals, lay in the two faces of Justice William Brennan’s majority opinion—which on the one hand reflected the liberalizing attitude toward sexual matters in mid-century America, but on the other kept “obscene” expressions beyond First Amendment protection. Because that ruling points up the contradictions of a society where the prurient and repressive commingle uncomfortably, Strub shows how Roth says much more about American sexual values than Brennan’s written words necessarily acknowledged. In our era of internet pornography and Fifty Shades of Grey, it may be difficult to imagine a time when obscenity was a matter for the courts. As Strub tracks the legacy of Roth and obscenity law through the ongoing policing of acceptable sexuality into the twenty-first century, his riveting narrative brings those times to life and helps readers navigate the fine line between what is socially acceptable and what is criminally obscene.

Girls Lean Back Everywhere

Girls Lean Back Everywhere PDF Author: Edward De Grazia
Publisher: New York : Random House
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 832

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Book Description
Chronicles the battles fought and won during the twentieth century in behalf of free expression.

The Law of Obscenity

The Law of Obscenity PDF Author: Frederick F. Schauer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description


Degradation

Degradation PDF Author: Kevin W Saunders
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814741452
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Throughout history obscenity has not really been about sex but about degradation. Sexual depictions have been suppressed when they were seen as lowering the status of humans, furthering our distance from the gods or God and moving us toward the animals. In the current era, when we recognize ourselves and both humans and animals, sexual depiction has lost some of its sting. Its degrading role has been replaced by hate speech that distances groups, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, not only from God but from humanity to a subhuman level. In this original study of the relationship between obscenity and hate speech, First Amendment specialist Kevin W. Saunders traces the legal trajectory of degradation as it moved from sexual depiction to hateful speech. Looking closely at hate speech in several arenas, including racist, homophobic, and sexist speech in the workplace, classroom, and other real-life scenarios, Saunders posits that if hate speech is today’s conceptual equivalent of obscenity, then the body of law that dictated obscenity might shed some much-needed light on what may or may not qualify as punishable hate speech.

A Matter of Obscenity

A Matter of Obscenity PDF Author: Christopher Hilliard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691226105
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A comprehensive history of censorship in modern Britain For Victorian lawmakers and judges, the question of whether a book should be allowed to circulate freely depended on whether it was sold to readers whose mental and moral capacities were in doubt, by which they meant the increasingly literate and enfranchised working classes. The law stayed this way even as society evolved. In 1960, in the obscenity trial over D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the prosecutor asked the jury, "Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" Christopher Hilliard traces the history of British censorship from the Victorians to Margaret Thatcher, exposing the tensions between obscenity law and a changing British society. Hilliard goes behind the scenes of major obscenity trials and uncovers the routines of everyday censorship, shedding new light on the British reception of literary modernism and popular entertainments such as the cinema and American-style pulp fiction and comic books. He reveals the thinking of lawyers and the police, authors and publishers, and politicians and ordinary citizens as they wrestled with questions of freedom and morality. He describes how supporters and opponents of censorship alike tried to remake the law as they reckoned with changes in sexuality and culture that began in the 1960s. Based on extensive archival research, this incisive and multifaceted book reveals how the issue of censorship challenged British society to confront issues ranging from mass literacy and democratization to feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism.

Memoirs of Fanny Hill

Memoirs of Fanny Hill PDF Author: John Cleland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description


The First Amendment

The First Amendment PDF Author: David L. Hudson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780314606488
Category : Constitutional law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The Law of Obscenity and Pornography

The Law of Obscenity and Pornography PDF Author: Margaret C. Jasper
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description


Lust on Trial

Lust on Trial PDF Author: Amy Werbel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023154703X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 589

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Book Description
Anthony Comstock was America’s first professional censor. From 1873 to 1915, as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a crusade against lasciviousness, salaciousness, and obscenity that resulted in the confiscation and incineration of more than three million pictures, postcards, and books he judged to be obscene. But as Amy Werbel shows in this rich cultural and social history, Comstock’s campaign to rid America of vice in fact led to greater acceptance of the materials he deemed objectionable, offering a revealing tale about the unintended consequences of censorship. In Lust on Trial, Werbel presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture. Born into a puritanical New England community, Anthony Comstock moved to New York in 1868 armed with his Christian faith and a burning desire to rid the city of vice. Werbel describes how Comstock’s raids shaped New York City and American culture through his obsession with the prevention of lust by means of censorship, and how his restrictions provided an impetus for the increased circulation and explicitness of “obscene” materials. By opposing women who preached sexual liberation and empowerment, suppressing contraceptives, and restricting artistic expression, Comstock drew the ire of civil liberties advocates, inspiring more open attitudes toward sexual and creative freedom and more sophisticated legal defenses. Drawing on material culture high and low, including numerous examples of the “obscenities” Comstock seized, Lust on Trial provides fresh insights into Comstock’s actions and motivations, the sexual habits of Americans during his era, and the complicated relationship between law and cultural change.