ABSTRACT
Miller v. California, 413 US 15, was one of a group of cases the US Supreme Court reviewed in a reexamination of standards enunciated in earlier cases defining obscenity, which the Court had long held was not entitled to protection under the right to free speech as outlined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution and as also applied to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The California statute was based loosely on the Supreme Court's previous holding in Roth v. United States, 354 US 476, in which the Court ruled that implicit in the history of the First Amendment was the rejection of constitutional protection for obscenity as its being utterly without redeeming social importance. Roth identified certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which never were thought to raise any constitutional problem, including the lewd and obscene.
