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''Quantity of Books v. Kansas'', , is an ''in rem'' United States Supreme Court decision on First Amendment questions relating to the forfeiture of obscene material. By a 7–2 margin, the Court held that a seizure of the books was unconstitutional, since no hearing had been held on whether the books were obscene, and it reversed a Kansas Supreme Court decision that upheld the seizure. The case arose several years earlier when police in Junction City, Kansas raided an adult bookstore. The state's Attorney General, William M. Ferguson, had previously filed an information with the county court listing 51 titles published by Nightstand Books as allegedly obscene; at the bookstore, 31 of those titles found and 1,175 were seized. These procedures were believed to be in keeping with the Supreme Court's recent ''Marcus v. Search Warrant'' decision, which held that some sort of judicial review was necessary to determine if seized material was obscene prior to seizure. Justice William Brennan wrote for a four-justice plurality that considered the case strictly on procedural grounds, without reaching the question of the books' obscenity. It could, he said, operate as a form of prior restraint. In one of two separate concurrences, Justice Hugo Black reaffirmed his earlier blanket opposition to all legal suppression of obscenity, in which he was joined by William O. Douglas. Justice Potter Stewart said that the books in question were not hardcore pornography, which was the only material that he could consider holding to be unprotected by the First Amendment in ''Quantity of Books'' In dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote for himself and Tom Clark in faulting Brennan's application of the precedents he relied on. He also disputed whether the procedure was truly prior restraint, since it did not review the material prior to publication. The Court, he concluded, was unfairly denying Kansas the full range of legal tools it might otherwise have had to pursue if it had decided it was an important state interest. == Background == For most of American history, literary and artistic works depicting, or even alluding to, sexual acts and topics or using profane language had been banned from publication or distribution, often by both confiscation of the works themselves and criminal prosecution of all individuals involved, following the traditions of English common law on obscenity and statutes at the state and federal levels. At the same time, demand for such materials continued, and the laws were often widely flouted. No defendant or claimant in such an action had ever persuaded a court to entertain the argument that the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and free expression barred them. That began to change during the 20th century, in response to social and cultural trends of greater tolerance for literature and art that depicted such proscribed material. In the landmark 1933 case ''United States v. One Book Called Ulysses'', Judge John M. Woolsey of the Southern District of New York ruled that James Joyce's novel ''Ulysses'', chapters of which had been held obscene over a decade earlier when published in a literary review, could not be barred from the United States purely on the basis of its language and content without considering its literary merit.〔''United States v. One Book Called Ulysses'', 5 F.Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y., 1933).〕 Second Circuit judges Learned and Augustus Hand upheld Woolsey on appeal,〔''(United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses, by James Joyce )'', 72 F.2d 705 (2nd Cir., 1934)〕 and the book, considered a masterpiece of modernist literature, could be freely published and sold. Censorship battles continued in the next decades over other works of literature and art, such as ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'', expanding to include films. In 1957, the Supreme Court finally considered a case arising from an obscenity prosecution, ''Roth v. United States''.〔''Roth v. United States'', .〕 Justice William Brennan wrote for a 6–3 majority that upheld the criminal conviction but abandoned the century-old Hicklin test in favor of a narrower definition of obscenity. It did not settle the issue, however, and the Warren Court had to hear more cases arising from subsequent prosecutions in the next decade, during which the Sexual Revolution began a more direct challenge to social mores on the issue. Some of those cases did not implicate the issue of obscenity itself but the procedures that were used to suppress it. In 1961, the Court had heard ''Marcus v. Search Warrant'', in which several bookstores in Kansas City, Missouri had challenged the seizure of some of their wares prior to any hearing at which they could contest the finding of obscenity. The Court had unanimously found this procedure violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, since there were First Amendment interests at stake in obscenity prosecutions that were not present in other forfeiture cases.〔''Marcus v. Search Warrant'', .〕 In 1961, shortly after ''Marcus'', William M. Ferguson, Kansas's Attorney General, filed an information in Geary County district court naming 59 titles, all bearing the subhead, "This is an original Night-Stand Book", a level of detail greater than that required by Kansas's anti-obscenity statutes. He included, as evidence, copies of seven titles, six of which had paper bookmarks marking the location of passages, that were circled in pencil, that violated the law. The judge also went beyond statutory requirements, conducting a 45-minute ''ex parte'' reading in his chambers, at the conclusion of which he agreed that the books were probably obscene under Kansas law. All these extra procedures were seen by the attorney general as necessary in light of ''Marcus''.〔''Quantity of Books v. Kansas'', at 208–09, (1961), Brennan, J.〕 The judge issued a warrant to be served by the county sheriff's office. It was strictly limited to the 59 titles named by the Attorney General. On the same day, deputies served the warrant at P–K News Service in Junction City, the county seat. They found copies of 31 of the listed books offered for sale and seized 1,715 copies in all. No employees or customers were arrested.〔 A hearing was held ten days later where P–K could argue that the books were not obscene. Since there were no criminal charges involved, it was strictly a civil forfeiture action, held under ''in rem'' jurisdiction with the seized books themselves as defendants. P–K moved to have the information and the warrant quashed on the grounds that, since they had not been afforded a hearing on the obscenity question prior to the seizure, their constitutional rights had been violated. They argued that, as it was, the seizure was "a prior restraint on the circulation and dissemination of books".〔 The motion was denied, and the court ordered the books destroyed. The bookstore appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court, which upheld the order. The U.S. Supreme Court granted ''certiorari'' in 1963. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Quantity of Books v. Kansas」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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