#hard-core

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When the time had come for the estate of the late Justice Potter Stewart (1915-1985) to be put up for sale in the autumn of 2011, the public were invited to view the property and the personal possessions still within it. Among the scattered items, a clutch of family photographs drew the interest of attending journalists, whose initial instinct was to see in the group of five a picture of the judge with his wife and three children before, on closer inspection, one of Potter's “sons” turned out to be Rock Hudson. No further research ensued, but the curious nature of the discovery was noted in several press reports of the event. Curious precisely because of the unlikely intersection between the world of jurisprudence and the entertainment industry which perhaps ought not to have been as mysterious as it may have appeared at first glance.

Potter Stewart had served on the US Supreme Court for 23 years before retiring in 1981. As an Associate Justice, Stewart's reputation was that of a "Republican centrist," more often than not he was found siding with the liberal bloc on the bench in an era of contentious civil rights decisions and questions of personal liberties, justice reform, and women's rights, to name but a few of the hot button issues under consideration during the two decades of Stewart's tenure - at the end of which he administered the oath of office for Vice President George Bush senior. His claim to fame, however, rests on a 1964 case that required the court to define what constituted an obscene and therefore illegal publication. Potter Stewart declined to offer a definition of "hard-core pornography," stating instead that "I know it when I see it."

The case under scrutiny concerned Louis Malle's 1958 film of The Lovers, whose artistic merits were firmly established as a result. An intensely private man, Stewart would not allow his name to be put forward as a candidate for the top job on the court because he did not wish to see his family subjected to the confirmation process, and refused a presidential nomination for the same reason in August of 1967. A pivotal month, by any standard‚ it also saw the judge engaged in ongoing proceedings against Martin Luther King Jr, whose sentence for contempt of court he upheld, and the nomination of the first black Associate Justice to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, who was eventually confirmed on the thirty-first.