Word: brennan
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...counsel for Florida Indigent Clarence Gideon. Apparently, much like Goldberg, he sees the cases in terms of the Magna Carta-in terms of human liberty rather than "just convicting people." While that seemed to leave the Justices split about as before, court watchers also noted that Justice William J. Brennan remained conspicuously silent, often the sign of a "swing man" who hopes to engineer a majority vote on a compromise...
...Justice Brennan refused to endorse the trial judge's ringing condemnation of all three Ginzburg products as themselves obscene and "a gross shock to the mind." Instead, Brennan nailed Ginzburg for salacious sales pitches. In one Eros brochure, he blatantly promised articles on "Incest in the American Midwest," "Was Shakespeare a Homosexual?" and "Sex in the Supermarket." Before Ginzburg acquired Handbook, its author, "Rey Anthony," printed it privately, sold 12,000 copies to assorted therapists, several of whom had testified at the trial that it proved useful in professional practice. Ginzburg's companies, said Brennan, went beyond this...
...Rules. In the second case, New York Pornographer Edward Mishkin argued that his books were not legally obscene because they excited only sick rather than normal people. Brennan agreed-and duly "adjusted" Roth's prurient-appeal standard from the "average adult" to the average members of any "probable recipient group," including sadists and masochists...
...third case, which cleared Fanny Hill, Brennan noted expert testimony in the Massachusetts trial that Fanny "belongs to the history of English literature rather than the history of smut." All the same, added Brennan, in an apparent invitation to further litigation, "evidence that the book was commercially exploited for the sake of prurient appeal, to the exclusion of all other values, might justify the conclusion that the book was utterly without redeeming social value...
...Supreme Court upheld the conviction, but Justice William Brennan Jr.'s majority opinion is puzzling indeed. Brennan explained that the Court could use a publisher's manner of advertising to determine whether the material itself is obscene. A publication with some kind of "redeeming social value" may escape the obscenity charge. But Brennan seemed to be saying that titillating publicity establishes the obscenity of a book's content. When the material's status is uncertain by other tests, the advertising criterion may tip the scale in favor of labelling the publication obscene...