pornography

In 1962 Detroit adopted an Anti-Skid Row Ordinance that identified specific property uses as especially injurious to neighborhoods when concentrated. Effective November 2, 1972, the city amended the ordinance to add adult motion picture theaters and adult bookstores to the list of regulated uses. The amendments prohibited an adult theater from locating within 1,000 feet of any two other regulated uses or within 500 feet of a residential area. An adult theater was defined as any enclosed building used for presenting material distinguished or characterized by an emphasis on Specified Sexual Activities or Specified Anatomical Areas. Those terms were defined to include specific sexual acts and body parts. The respondents operated two theaters subject to the amended ordinance. The Nortown, an established theater, began exhibiting adult films in March 1973. The Pussy Cat, a converted corner gas station operating as a mini theater, was denied a certificate of occupancy because of its plan to show adult films. Both locations fell within 1,000 feet of two other regulated uses, and the Pussy Cat also stood less than 500 feet from a residential area. The respondents filed separate actions against city officials in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. The District Court granted the defendants' motion for summary judgment. The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed. The Supreme Court granted certiorari.

The appellant conducted a mass mailing campaign advertising the sale of illustrated books and a film described as adult material. After a jury trial he was convicted under California Penal Code § 311.2(a) for knowingly distributing obscene matter based on the mailing of five unsolicited advertising brochures to a Newport Beach restaurant. The brochures contained explicit pictures and drawings depicting sexual activity and genitals. This case was tried on the theory that California's obscenity statute incorporated the tripartite Memoirs test and the jury was instructed to apply contemporary community standards of the State of California. Both parties at trial assumed the community standards were those of the State of California; defense counsel did not object to the state's expert testimony on community standards or to the judge's instruction. Appellant raised for the first time on appeal the contention that application of state rather than national standards violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The judgment of the Appellate Department of the Superior Court, Orange County, California, came before the Supreme Court of the United States for review as part of a group of obscenity cases in which the Court re-examined the standards for identifying obscene material that may be regulated by the States.

In the predawn hours of June 21, 1990, petitioner R.A.V., then a juvenile, and several other teenagers assembled a crudely made cross by taping together broken chair legs and burned the cross inside the fenced yard of a black family that lived across the street from the house where R.A.V. was staying. Although this conduct could have been punished under several Minnesota statutes carrying significant penalties, the City of St. Paul chose to charge R.A.V. under the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance. The ordinance provides that whoever places on public or private property a symbol, object, appellation, characterization or graffiti, including but not limited to a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor. R.A.V. moved to dismiss the charge on the ground that the ordinance was substantially overbroad and impermissibly content-based and therefore facially invalid under the First Amendment, and the trial court granted the motion. The Minnesota Supreme Court reversed, construing the ordinance to reach only fighting words and concluding that it was not impermissibly content-based. This Court granted certiorari.