Obscenity and Community Standards
Obscenity and Community Standards
Bret Boyce, 33 Yale J. Int’l L. 299 (2008)
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This Article argues that the invocation of community standards to suppress obscenity cannot be reconciled with those fundamental individual rights, and that the substitution of a harm-based standard has not resolved this problem. The legal concept of obscenity cannot be reformed and therefore must be scrapped. In both the United States and Canada, obscenity doctrine rests on the barely concealed and unjustified assumption that sexual expression is, by its very nature, scarcely worthy of protection. Regardless of whether harm or morality is proffered as the underlying concern, “community standards” and the claim that obscenity causes “harm to society” are consistently deployed to enforce majoritarian prejudices and to suppress dissentient or “deviant” art, literature, cultures, and sexualities.