1 Md. App. 591 - Donnenberg v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1967
Citation profile
4 district · 32 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 40 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 1995 · most notably Osborne v. Ohio (1990), 82 Wash. 2d 584 - State v. J-R Distributors, Inc. (1973)
4 district · 32 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Roth v. United States · Jacobellis v. Ohio · Book Named 'John Cleland's Memoirs of Woman of Pleasure' v. Attorney General of Commonwealth of Massachusetts · Ginzburg v. United States · Mishkin v. State of New York
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 40 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“* * * [II]ard-core pornography or obscenity per se is obscenity which “focuses predominately upon what is sexually morbid, grossly perverse and bizarre without any artistic or scientific purpose or justification.” There is no desire to portray [it] in pseudo-scientific or “arty” terms. It can be recognized by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex and to the human spirit. It goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor and deviates from society’s standards of decency in the representation of the matters in which it deals. It has a patent absence of any redeeming social value; it speaks for itself and screams for all to hear that it is obscene. It is not designed to be a truthful description of the basic realities of life as the individual experiences them but its main purpose [is] to stimulate erotic response. * * No proof, other than the viewing of it, is required to determine if it is, in fact, obscene.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“Three elements must coalesce; it must be established that: 1) The dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex. a) where the material is designed for and primarily disseminated to a clearly defined deviant sexual group, rather than the public at large, the prurient-appeal requirement is satisfied if the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest in sex of the members of that group. 2) The material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters. 3) The material is utterly without redeeming social value. Each of the above three federal constitutional criteria must be applied independently and neither be weighed against nor canceled by any of the others. a) As an aid to determining the question of obscenity, the setting in which the material was presented may be considered. Thus evidence of pandering `the business of purveying textual or graphic matter openly advertised to appeal to the erotic interest is relevant' and `where a purveyor's sole emphasis is on the sexually provocative aspects of his publications, a court could accept his evaluation on its face value.'”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“"States are free to adopt other definitions of obscenity only to the extent that those adopted stay within the bounds set by the constitutional criteria of the Roth definition, which restrict the regulation of the publication and sale of books to that traditionally and universally tolerated in our society."”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.