Legal Status

The most famous opinion from Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), however, was Justice Potter Stewart's concurrence, holding that the Constitution protected all obscenity except "hard-core pornography." Stewart wrote, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 US 184 (1964)

Jacobellis v. Ohio focused on the right of the state to ban the showing of a film (The Lovers) from being shown in theaters due to being labeled obscene.

The case was heard in the United States Supreme Court, where a majority ruling deemed the movie not to be obscene, though none of the justices could agree on the rationale for their decision.