Prerequisites: None

Exam Type: No Exam

For a century and a half, American law has put art on trial. The defendants have included a novel, a poem, a monologue, a rap album, a photograph, a museum, and a drag performer. This reading group examines that tradition from the Comstock Act of 1873 to the litigation of the past year, and it does so through the works themselves. Students will read the passages of Ulysses and Howl that prosecutors put on trial, watch excerpts of the film the Supreme Court freed from the censors in 1952, listen to the Carlin monologue reprinted in the appendix to Pacifica and the 2 Live Crew tracks the Eleventh Circuit vindicated, and study the photographs a Cincinnati jury acquitted in 1990. Each class opens with the work itself, introduced by a student, before the group turns to the law.

The subject is newly urgent. Over the past two years, courts and officials have fought over library book removals, drag performances, age verification for online content, a canceled National Portrait Gallery retrospective, White House review of Smithsonian exhibitions, and a federal statue program requiring classical, lifelike designs and excluding abstract or modernist forms. The Comstock Act that opens the first session has itself reemerged in contemporary disputes over the mailing of abortion-related medication. Across six sessions, the course moves from books, film, music, and visual art to questions of government patronage and live performance, asking throughout who decides what art is for and whether the First Amendment supplies an answer.

Note: This reading group will meet on the following dates: TBD.