Jacobellis v. Ohio

Justices Warren and Clark dissented. They believed that community standards of the local area in which the work was being prosecuted should be invoked. And Justice Harlan, another dissenter, believed that while federal laws had to define obscenity very narrowly, states had somewhat more latitude in making these judgments.

However, the dissenters were not the only ones to express individual opinions in this controversial case. Those who agreed with the majority decision also wrote their own opinions about it. Justice Black, for example, joined by Justice Douglas, wrote a "First Amendment absolutist" opinion. The justices felt that any conviction of anyone for exhibiting a movie "abridges freedom of the press as safeguarded by the First Amendment." Since the Fourteenth Amendment meant that state laws, too, had to follow the First Amendment, no laws against obscenity were possible under the Constitution.

Justice Goldberg wrote a separate opinion, stressing that the love scene in the movie was "so fragmentary and fleeting that only a censor's alert would make an audience conscious that something `questionable' is being portrayed." Perhaps, wrote Goldberg sarcastically, the exhibitors of the movie could be prosecuted--but only if the "exaggerated character of the advertising rather than the obscenity of the film is to be the constitutional criterion."

But the most famous opinion in the Jacobellis case came from Justice Stewart, who said that the only unprotected material in his opinion was "hard-core pornography." Stewart expressed his concern that such material was impossible to define. "But I know it when I see it," he wrote, coining a phrase that was to become widely quoted in both admiring and disparaging terms.