ABSTRACT
The Hicklin test, a narrowly drawn inquiry for determining obscenity that derived from the British case of Regina v. Hicklin, was widely used in the United States for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Hicklin test had its origins in the British Obscene Publications Act of 1857, sponsored by the Lord Chief Justice John Campbell. The act authorized the police to seize published material they deemed obscene and to have that material destroyed unless its owner appeared before a court and disproved the charge. In the United States, Judge Learned Hand was among the earliest to question the Hicklin test in United States v. Kennerley, a case against the publisher of the novel Hagar Revelly, which told of the hard life of an impoverished woman on the streets of New York, written by a social hygienist hoping to warn youths of the dangers of vice.
