19711776 Club
Harlan writes for the Court, 5–4: California cannot jail a man for words on a jacket
Paul Robert Cohen's "Fuck the Draft" conviction is reversed; Harlan holds that offense alone gives the state no power to silence speech.
Three years after a Los Angeles courthouse officer arrested him in a corridor, 19-year-old Paul Robert Cohen got his answer from the nation's highest court. Cohen had been wearing a jacket bearing the words "Fuck the Draft" when he was arrested on April 26, 1968 — charged with disturbing the peace under a California statute, convicted, and sentenced to 30 days in jail. In 1971, Justice John Harlan delivered the Court's 5–4 ruling reversing the conviction, finding that the State could not criminalize speech simply because it offended — and offering one of the most quoted lines in First Amendment history: "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric."…
