1969\u2014Justice Thurgood Marshall\u2019s majority opinion in Stanley v. Georgia declares that the First Amendment forbids criminalizing the possession of concededly obscene material. Marshall blithely distinguishes away the Court\u2019s previous categorical statements that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. Stanley, Marshall grandiosely proclaims, is asserting \u201cthe right to satisfy his intellectual and emotional needs in the privacy of his own home.\u201d Yep, that carefully captures what viewing obscenity is all about. (Three justices, including Brennan, decline to join Marshall\u2019s opinion and instead separately find a Fourth Amendment basis for vacating Stanley\u2019s conviction.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Anytime the First and Fourth Amendment is decided in favor of freedom of speech or the press or the right to be secure from government intrusion is judicial activism?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Judicial activism” is determined only by whether your side won: NPR: This Day in Liberal Judicial Activism\u2014April 7 by Ed Whelan:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scotus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37116"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37119,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37116\/revisions\/37119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}