Obscenity and Nationalism: Constitutional Freedom of Sexual Expression in Comparative Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Article surveys the development of constitutional obscenity jurisprudence in the United States, Canada, India and Japan. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each of these jurisdictions undertook to impose restrictive Victorian standards of sexual morality on literature and the arts. In the second half of the twentieth century, their constitutional courts began seriously considering free expression claims brought by artists and writers prosecuted for obscenity. These courts have all struggled with a central paradox. Obscenity law criminalizes speech because it is offensive, but freedom of speech is an empty concept if it does not include the freedom to offend. The United States began to move away from Victorian standards after the middle of the twentieth century, replacing them with “community standards” and a promise of protection for “serious” works. Canada adopted an approach purportedly based on harm rather than morality, with results that were scarcely less repressive. Courts in India and Japan have been slow to extend protection to sexual speech. Paradoxically, in both India and Japan, nationalist prosecutors and judges have embraced imported Victorian standards of propriety as an expression of national identity, deploying them to suppress not just foreign but also indigenous works. Their narrow nationalism depends on a sanitized and incomplete picture of history, so sometimes defendants have prevailed when they could appeal to more tolerant pre-Victorian national traditions. This Article concludes that while obscenity law evidently does little to protect public morality or prevent harm, it can be a dangerous weapon in the hands of groups seeking to enforce political, social, and cultural conformity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".