id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cjgl-13704	Ball, Carlos A.	Obscenity, Morality, and the First Amendment: the First LGBT Rights Cases Before the Supreme Court	2014	86	.pdf	application/pdf	39399	1451	52	The fact that the Court did not introduce its more robust defense of free speech rights until several years after One and Manual Enterprises leads me to conclude that the outcomes in those two cases are more persuasively explained through the kind of detailed exploration of changing judicial understandings of obscenity law that I provide in this Article, understandings that largely preceded the Court's two gay obscenity rulings. 28.2 COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF GENDER AND LAW I. Obscenity and Morality in the Courts from the Early 19th Century until the 1950s During approximately the first one hundred and twenty years of obscenity prosecutions in the United States (that is, roughly between the 1810s until the 1930s), courts frequently, and without much controversy or disagreement, pointed to the promotion of public mo- rality as the main objective behind obscenity laws. Whatever difficulties inhered in distinguishing between publications that had some social value from those that did not- difficulties clearly reflected in the rash of fractured Supreme Court obscenity cases that followed Roth'35 and in Justice Stewart's famous claim that, while it might not be possible to come up with an articulable definition of obscenity, he knew pornography when he saw it' 36-- the judicial review of obscenity regulations after Roth was significantly removed from the considerations of public morality that had dominated the legal analysis in decades past.	cache/cjgl-13704.pdf	txt/cjgl-13704.txt