"Butler involved a challenge to a Michigan
statute that forbade the publication, sale, or distribution of
printed material "tending to incite minors to violent or depraved
or immoral acts, manifestly tending to the corruption of the
morals of youth.". Although Roth v. United
States, supra, had not yet been decided, it is at least arguable
that the material the statute in Butler was designed to suppress
could have been constitutionally denied to children.
Nevertheless, this Court found the statute unconstitutional.
Speaking for the Court, Mr. Justice Frankfurter reasoned:
`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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