Quantity of Copies of Books v. Kansas/Concurrence Potter Stewart
United States Supreme Court
Quantity of Copies of Books v. Kansas
Appeal from the Kansas Supreme Court
No. 449. Argued: April 1–2, 1964 --- Decided: June 22, 1964
MR. JUSTICE STEWART, concurring in the judgment.
If this case involved hard core pornography, I think the procedures which were followed would be constitutionally valid, at least with respect to the material which the judge "scrutinized." This case is not like Marcus v. Search Warrant, 367 U. S. 717, where, as the Court notes,
"the warrant gave the police virtually unlimited authority to seize any publications which they considered to be obscene, and was issued on a verified complaint lacking any specific description of the publications to be seized, and without prior submission of any publications whatever to the judge issuing the warrant,"
p. 378 U.S. 209, supra. But the books here involved were not hard core pornography. Therefore, I think Kansas could not by any procedure constitutionally suppress them, any more than
Kansas could constitutionally make their sale or distribution a criminal act. See Jacobellis v. Ohio, ante, p. 378 U.S. 197 (STEWART, J., concurring).
Notes edit
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work of the United States federal government (see 17 U.S.C. 105).
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse