“You can’t prove that a teacher is not effective,” said the mayor. “But it’s like the Supreme Court, I forget which justice said it, he said, ‘You know, I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.’ Well, same thing.”
That would be the following:
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”]; 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.
And as Capital New York deftly noted, that was indeed Justice Potter Stewart, in 1964. It was not the court’s official opinion, however. In fact, the court had such a hard time figuring out a rationale for their ruling (in this case, that the film was not obscene, and thus constitutionally protected speech — obscenity, on the other hand, is not protected and therefore may be banned) that there were four different majority opinions, with none garnering the support of more than two justices. (The kind of ruling that provides zero clarity for boundary-pushers going forward, but provides law professors with excellent fodder for tormenting students).
(Ignoring the legal details of when someone in the position of a public teacher may generally be hired and fired, a rule making behavior impermissible according to how Bloomberg sees it would probably run afoul of another fun supreme court doctrine.)
Anyone want to guess what the film involved in the original I-know-it-when-I-see-it case (Jacobellis v. Ohio) was called? And in what state was someone so brazen as to screen a potentially obscene film?
(You can obviously find it in about three seconds on Wikipedia, but what’s the fun in that?)
Hey, thanks Law for the People. Cool Tumblr.
(Source: capitalnewyork)
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capitalnewyork reblogged this from lawforthepeople and added:
Hey, thanks Law for the People. Cool Tumblr.
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lawforthepeople reblogged this from capitalnewyork and added:
That would be the following:...And as Capital New York deftly noted, that was indeed...
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