Burstyn v. Wilson (1952)

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Background Information

A highly controversial film, "The Miracle," produced in Italy and starring Anna Magnani, had been licensed for showing in New York and had been screened in the city for about eight weeks. Strongly negative public reaction caused the license to be withdrawn on the grounds that the movie was "sacrilegious." The distributor of the film filed suit challenging the restriction against sacriligious films. The law in question stated:

The director of the [motion picture] division [of the education department] or, when authorized by the regents, the officers of a local office or bureau shall cause to be promptly examined every motion picture film submitted to them as herein required, and unless such film or a part thereof is obscene, indecent, immoral, inhuman, sacrilegious, or is of such a character that its exhibition would tend to corrupt morals or incite to crime, shall issue a license therefore. If such director or, when so authorized, such officer shall not license any film submitted, he shall furnish to the applicant therefor a written report of the reasons for his refusal and a description of each rejected part of a film not rejected in toto.

According to the distributor, a state law allowing for films to be banned for essentially religous reasons violated of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Court Decision

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court agreed with the plaintiff's arguments and struck down the New York State law allowing for "sacrilegious" films to be banned from public showings. According to the Court, films are an important medium for communicating ideas in society, something not lessened by the fact that they are also designed to entertain. Expression by means of film thus deserves the same protections of liberty under the First Amendment as those for newspapers, books, magazines, etc.

The idea that some form of expression can be banned because it is deemed "sacrilegious" was rejected for two reasons. First, the standard was too vague:

In seeking to apply the broad and all-inclusive definition of "sacrilegious" given by the New York courts, the censor is set adrift upon a boundless sea amid a myriad of conflicting currents of religious views, with no charts but those provided by the most vocal and powerful orthodoxies.

Second, the state has no legitimate interest in protecting any one or even all religious groups from views which they find to be distasteful.

[F]rom the standpoint of freedom of speech and the press, it is enough to point out that the state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them which is sufficient to justify prior restraints upon the expression of those views. It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches, or motion pictures.

Significance

This was the first case where motion pictures were found to be protected by the First Amendment. The Court thus overruled Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission (1915), where the Court had said that the exhibition of moving pictures was a business pure and simple, conducted for profit, like other spectacles, and was not to be regarded as part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion.