Business Law Paper

Essay by EssaySwap ContributorCollege, Undergraduate February 2008

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Scandals and public fury have earned many books a place on the best-sellers list. Thus, curious readers are drawn to controversy, making these books what we call best sellers. Is it easy to equate that scandals whether sex related, or politically incorrect stories translates into sales. However, most of these books in past histories have gained the attention of the Supreme Courts. In the Supreme Court case, A Book Named John Cleland¡¯s ¡°Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure¡± v. Massachussets of 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the lower court decisions for the novel ¡°Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure¡± as obscene. The lower court had noted that the "social importance"p.426 element of the Roth test, which did not require that a book "must be unqualifiedly worthless before it can be deemed obscene." However, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decisions of the lower courts, emphasizing that under Roth, material could not be deemed obscene unless it was "utterly without redeeming social value".

Thus, according to Judge Brennan and Judge Fortas, the following requirements are necessary in order to constitute a book as being obscene: it must be established that (a) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters; and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value. ...

The following statement falls under article 354 U.S 476 of Roth v. U.S., and this pretty much re-enforces the present idea of social morality and pornography control in the media. Yet it is needless to say that even though laws of pornography were established in previous times to prevent immorality in society, we can still find many books,