Siegel and Ziegler on Comstockery: How Government Censorship Gave Birth to the Law of Sexual and Reproductive Freedom, and May Again Threaten It @YaleLawSch @maryrziegler

Reva Siegel, Yale University Law School, and Mary Ziegler, University of California, Davis, School of Law, are publishing Comstockery: How Government Censorship Gave Birth to the Law of Sexual and Reproductive Freedom, and May Again Threaten It in the Yale Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

In the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the antiabortion movement has focused on a new strategy: transforming the Comstock Act, a postal obscenity statute enacted in 1873, into a de facto national ban on abortion. Claims on the Comstock Act have been asserted in the medication abortion case now before the Supreme Court and in the campaign for the Presidency. This Article offers one of the first legal histories of the Comstock Act that reaches from its enactment to its post-Dobbs reinvention, offering critical resources for evaluating claims for revived enforcement of Comstock that are now being asserted in courts and in politics. The history this Article uncovers undermines revivalists’ claims about the Comstock statute’s meaning and the democratic legitimacy of reviving its enforcement. Yet the Article’s significance ranges well beyond the revival debate, as it uncovers in conflicts over Comstock’s enforcement popular claims on democracy, liberty, and equality in which we can recognize roots of modern free speech law and the law of sexual and reproductive liberty lost to constitutional memory.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Amy Werbel's New Book on Anthony Comstock and Censorship in the Gilded and Progressive Periods; "Lust on Trial" @awerbel @LustonTrial @ColumbiaUP

Amy Werbel, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, is publishing Lust on Trial:Censorship and the Rise of American Obsenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (Columbia University Press).  Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Lust on Trial offers a new and unadulterated view of the risqué behaviors and complex sexualities of Americans in the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras, and a fresh perspective on legal efforts to expand civil liberties before World War I. Extensive new research conducted in dozens of public and private archives makes it possible for the first time to fully tell the story of Anthony Comstock’s censorship of American visual culture, and to publish examples of the “obscenities” he suppressed. Lust on Trial illuminates the complex relationship between censorship and cultural change, and offers thought-provoking insight to our nation’s long struggle to live up to the promise of the First Amendment.