Butler v. State of Michigan
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Butler v. State of Michigan 352 U.S. 380 (1957) was a US obscenity case. It overturned the Hicklin test. In the trial, Alfred E. Butler was charged with selling The Devil Rides Outside by John Howard Griffin.
The case overturned the Hicklin Test when Michigan tried to outlaw all printed matter that would 'corrupt the morals of youth'.
Justice Felix Frankfurter:
- "The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women, in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig . . . We have before us legislation not reasonably restricted to the evil with which it is said to deal. The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. It thereby arbitrarily curtails one of those liberties of the individual, now enshrined in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, that history has attested as the indispensable conditions for the maintenance and progress of a free society."
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