Week Five Assignment

Ronald Blair

LS 305

Decenber 11, 2012

Professor James Kent

Week Five Assignment

Unprotected speech

The First Amendment protects a person's speech. There are several types of speech not protected by the First Amendment; they are obscenity, child pornography, fighting words, threats, and incitement to riot (Kanovitz, 2010).

Obscenity and child pornography are not protected by the First Amendment. Obscenity is defined by using the Miller test from Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973). This states that obscenity includes the following criteria: (1) whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, 'taken as a whole,' appeals to 'prurient interest' (2) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive...