“The day obscenity became art”

Fred Kaplan reports in the New York Times: “Today is the 50th anniversary of the court ruling that overturned America’s obscenity laws, setting off an explosion of free speech — and also, in retrospect, splashing cold water on the idea, much discussed during Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, that judges are ‘umpires’ rather than agents of social change.”