Suchergebnisse

Examines the collapse of the cooperation between the US government & the film industry regarding the regulation of sexual content -- in terms of both images & dialogue -- in movies, focusing on the period 1966-1971. Assuming that changes in morality policy are a political process involving issues of cultural power, rights, & economics, described is the political realignment that shifted regulation of sex in the movies from governmental police powers to the industry itself & then to a legally supported rating system. The bargaining process between state & local government censors, the film studios, the Legion of Decency, & the Production Code Administration is reviewed, & the movie rating code eventually developed by the Motion Picture Assoc of America following another lengthy bargaining process is described. It is argued that the collapse of the political order of censorship bargaining occurred gradually as the result of changes in morality, psychological ideas about sexual expression, economics, & the liberal legal constitutive perspective; the key roles of avant-garde intellectuals, policy entrepreneurs, & "loyalists" who continued to support government censorship are highlighted. Larger political, judicial, & economic changes that indirectly impacted the censorship debate & changed the boundaries regarding sexual content in the movies are also reviewed. K. Hyatt Stewart

The study of legal politics often attends to the description and explanation of the instrumental politics of legal change or to the mobilization of rights by individual citizens as an act of empowerment beneficial to their individual liberty. Drawing far less attention from the discipline is the privileged construction of a discourse or set of attitudes about rights by the judiciary. I present a case study of the First Amendment opinions of two members of the Supreme Court of the United States to criticize the range of their attitudes about rights and to illustrate how their opinions help construct and legitimate the disciplinary actions that provide order in the modern liberal regime. To preserve order, the justices are shown to use the language of rights as an instrument for the facilitation of violence, repression, and subjection against some litigants, rather than as an instrument for the enhancement of expressive liberties.