Supreme Court Develops “Miller Test” on Obscenity
In Miller v. California, decided on this day, the Supreme Court developed a three-pronged test for whether a work was obscene and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. The three-prong test became known as the “Miller Test” and remains the prevailing test today.
The Miller Test:
“(a) whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest . . .
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
The Miller test, however, contains a number of unresolved issues: how are “contemporary community standards” to be defined? How are the terms “patently offensive” and “prurient interest” defined? What constitutes “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”?
Learn more about the Miller test: http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/obscenity
Learn more: Nadine Strossen, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight For Women’s Rights (1995)
Learn more about the myths and facts about pornography: Marcia Pally, Sense and Censorship: The Vanity of the Bonfires (1991), http://mediacoalition.org/files/Sense-and-Censorship.pdf
Learn more at the National Coalition Against Censorship here.