Censorship of Motion Pictures. A recent amendment to the New York statute dealing with the licensing of motion pictures defines as “immoral” a picture “the dominant purpose or effect of which is erotic or pornographic; or which portrays acts of sexual immorality, perversity, or lewdness, or which expressly or impliedly presents such acts as desirable, acceptable or proper patterns of behavior.” The Education Department denied a license to the distributor of “Lady Chatterley's Lover” on the finding that three scenes were “immoral.” On appeal, the Regents of the University of New York upheld the denial of the license on the broader ground that “the whole theme of this motion picture is immoral under said law, for that theme is the presentation of adultery as a desirable, acceptable and proper pattern of behavior.” In affirming the denial, the Court of Appeals unanimously and explicitly rejected any notion that the film was obscene, but found rather that the picture as a whole “alluringly portrays adultery as proper behavior,” and that the only part of the statute applicable here was that which bars films which portray “acts of sexual immorality … as desirable.” Though there was no agreement on a single opinion, the Justices were unanimous in reversing the Court of Appeals. In behalf of a bare majority, Justice Stewart argued that since the state construction took the case outside the scope of such concepts as “obscenity” or “pornography,” and did not even suggest that the film would incite to illegal action, the state has in effect prohibited the exhibition of a motion picture because it advocates an idea, that under certain circumstances adultery may be proper behavior. This runs contrary to the basic guarantee of the First Amendment, which is the “freedom to advocate ideas,” and thus the state has quite simply “struck at the very heart of constitutionally protected liberty.” For the state misconceives what the Constitution protects. “Its guarantee,” wrote Justice Stewart, “is not confined to the expression of ideas that are conventional or shared by a majority. It protects advocacy of the opinion that adultery may sometimes be proper, no less than advocacy of socialism or the single tax. And in the realm of ideas it protects expression which is eloquent no less than that which is unconvincing.” Free speech, he went on to argue, cannot be denied where advocacy falls short of incitement, and where there is nothing to indicate that the advocacy will be acted on immediately.

In the long development of democracy, legal safeguards for individuals are usually established only in times of crisis or after grave dissatisfaction with the procedure employed in a particular case. Fortunately, in either instance, when the safeguard is given legal sanction, it is likely to continue in effect so that a cumulative body of protections is established. And in some rather unusual cases, civil rights and liberties broadly construed are guaranteed by an act of prescience: our Bill of Rights is an admirable example of the value of forethought.

During the past half century, Princeton University has established a substantial corpus of rules to protect academic freedom, twice because of dissatisfaction with the treatment of individual cases, once in response to crisis, once as an act of conscious foresight. The following brief report is submitted in the hope that some of Princeton's developments may serve as useful suggestions to its sister universities.

Princeton University has been singularly though certainly not entirely free of periods of crisis and of important and distressing academic freedom cases for the last half century. Its tradition of academic freedom goes at least as far back as the latter years of the 19th Century, but its first formal adoption of a rule did not come until 1918.

The year 1918 was a year of crisis. Across the face of the land, our universities and colleges reacted in a variety of ways, most frequently in the form of resolutions or rules that rested on a demand for full support of the prosecution of the war and that frequently led to exclusions and dismissals from faculty and student body. Princeton, too, was moved in this way and on June 5, 1918 the Faculty adopted such a resolution. Fortunately, Princeton also demonstrated another response to the crisis, of a very different character, and with permanent rather than ephemeral effect.