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Law Blog Obituary: George Carlin, a ?Footnote in American History?

By Dan Slater

By now you’ve probably heard the news of George Carlin’s passing. The famously irreverent comedian and actor died of heart failure yesterday in Santa Monica. He was 71. Here are stories from the NYT and LAT.

Like many American children, the LB was exposed to Carlin’s comedy at a young age. But we didn’t come to understand his role in U.S. legal history until a mass media class in law school, when we read FCC v. Pacifica, the 1978 Scotus case in which the Court decided that FCC sanctions could be invoked against a radio broadcast of words dealing with sex and execration, even if those words aren’t obscene.

The case arose out of a Carlin monologue, played at 2:00 p.m. on a weekday afternoon by Pacifica’s FM licensee in New York, that discussed at length the words s*** and f***. In upholding the constitutionality of the sanctions, Justice Stevens — joined by Rehnquist, Powell, Blackmun and Burger — wrote: “Patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen, not only in public, but also in the privacy of the home, where the individual’s right to be left alone plainly outweighs the First Amendment rights of an intruder.”

In conclusion, Stevens emphasized the narrowness of the holding. “As Mr. Justice Sutherland wrote [in Euclid v. Amber Realty], a ‘nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place, — like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard’ . . . We simply hold that when the Commission finds that a pig has entered the parlor, the exercise of its regulatory power does not depend on proof that the pig is obscene.”

Of the ruling, Carlin recently told the AP, “So my name is a footnote in American history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 23, 2008 (boomark / email).