THE SUPREME COURT: Free Cinema

In 1915, in a case involving censorship of the cinema in Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that movies are "a business, pure and simple," and therefore not entitled to constitutional guarantees of free expression. In early 1951, after pressure was brought by Catholic groups, New York State's Board of Regents banned Roberto Rossellini's controversial The Miracle (TIME, Feb. 26, 1951). The courts of New York, citing the U.S. high tribunal precedent, found the film "sacrilegious," upheld the censorship.

This week the Supreme Court reversed both its own 1915 judgment and the courts of New York. The Supreme Court ruled that 1) the cinema is entitled to the rights of free speech and free press, and 2) New York can not legally ban The Miracle on the sole grounds that it is "sacrilegious." Wrote Justice Thomas C. Clark, in the court's main opinion:

"In seeking to apply the broad and all-inclusive definition of 'sacrilegious' given by the New York courts, the censor is set adrift upon a boundless sea amid a myriad of conflicting currents of religious views, with no charts but those provided by the most vocal and powerful orthodoxies. New York cannot vest such unlimited restraining control over motion pictures in a censor."