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| Sully
October 17, 2019
10:26:08 PM
Entry #: 4273804
| Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971)
"The Court said that while the word at issue may have been more objectionable than most, distinguishing one offensive word from another is not something to be left to the states. “For, while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric. … [T]he Constitution leaves matters of taste and style so largely to the individual.”
"The Court said that freedom of expression is a “powerful medicine” in a democratic society, and trifling too much with the manner of that expression inherently limits the desired expression. The Court could not “indulge the facile assumption that one can forbid particular words without also running a substantial risk of suppressing ideas in the process” especially when “words are often chosen as much for their emotive as their cognitive force."
"In summing up the Court said that without a more particularized and compelling reason for its actions, the State could not, consistently with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, make the simple public display of the single four-letter expletive a criminal offense."
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