ABSTRACT
In Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., 501 US 560 (1991), the US Supreme Court was called upon to determine whether Indiana's public indecency statute violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression. A plurality, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy, concluded that the Indiana statute should be analyzed and upheld under the four-part test enunciated in United States v. O'Brien, 391 US 367 (1968), for evaluating regulations of expressive conduct. In reaching this de-termination, the plurality noted that the state's decision to protect societal order and morality by prohibiting totally nude dancing was "unrelated to the suppression of free expression" because "the require-ment that the dancers don pasties and G-strings does not deprive the dance of whatever erotic message it conveys; it simply makes the message slightly less graphic [and] [t]he perceived evil that Indiana seeks to address is not erotic dancing, but public nudity".
