Patently offensive is a term used in United States law regarding obscenity under the

First Amendment First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1). First or 1st may also refer to: *World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement Arts and media Music * 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and reco ...

. The phrase "patently offensive" first appeared in ''

Roth v. United States ''Roth v. United States'', 354 U.S. 476 (1957), along with its companion case ''Alberts v. California'', was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States which redefined the Constitutional test for determining what constitutes o ...

'', referring to any obscene acts or materials that are considered to be openly, plainly, or clearly visible as offensive to the viewing public. The ''Roth'' standard outlined what is to be considered obscene and thus not under First Amendment protection. The ''Roth'' standard was largely replaced by the ''Miller'' test established by ''

Miller v. California ''Miller v. California'', 413 U.S. 15 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court modifying its definition of obscenity from that of "utterly without socially redeeming value" to that which lacks "serious literary, artistic, polit ...

'' (1973).

Roth standard

According to the "Roth Standard" a work is obscene if: *The dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex, *The material is ''patently offensive'' because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters, *The material is utterly without redeeming social value

Miller test

The Miller test was developed in the 1973 case ''

''. It has three parts: *Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the

prurient Ian Dominick Fernow is an American experimental musician, poet and multimedia artist. He is best known for extreme music released under the stage name Prurient, as well as numerous other aliases including Vatican Shadow and Rainforest Spiritual ...

interest, *Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functionsThe syllabus of the case mentions only sexual conduct, but excretory functions are explicitly mentioned on page 25 of the majority opinion. specifically defined by applicable state law, *Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious

literary Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...

art Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...

istic,

political Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...

scientific Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

value. Chief Justice

Warren E. Burger Warren Earl Burger (September 17, 1907 – June 25, 1995) was an American attorney and jurist who served as the 15th chief justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Burger graduated from the St. Paul Colleg ...

, writing for the majority, included the following definitions of what may be "patently offensive": *"Representations or descriptions of ultimate sex acts normal or perverted, actual or simulated." *"Representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions, and lewd exhibitions of the genitals."

References

Supreme Court of the United States Obscenity law {{US-law-stub