This Day in Free Speech

Justice Felix Frankfurter

February 22

In 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Michigan obscenity law that made it a crime to publish, print or sell any work containing " obscene, immoral, lewd or lascivious language....tending to incite minors to violent or depraved or immoral acts." Lawyers for Michigan argued that the state must have the power to ban works that were harmful to children, even if the law violated the First Amendments rights of adults. Speaking for a unanimous court, Justice Felix Frankfurter disagreed: "Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. It thereby arbitrarily curtails one of those liberties of the individual....that history has attested as the indispensable conditions for the maintenance and progress of a free society."