Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan

Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58 (1963), was a United States Supreme Court case which held that the actions of the Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth, which involved pressuring distributors to stop selling certain publications, violated the First Amendment by creating an unconstitutional system of informal censorship. The Court ruled that the commission's practice of issuing notices and lists of objectionable publications to book distributors, and requesting their cooperation in preventing the sale of such publications, was unconstitutional. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. delivered the majority opinion, emphasizing that government entities cannot use indirect methods to suppress constitutionally protected speech and that states must create procedural safeguards to protect non-obscene materials from being censored subjectively. Justice John Marshall Harlan II dissented, arguing that the majorities decision failed to justify ruling against the commission's actions which he viewed only as an attempt to deal with a societal problem rather than a suppression of free speech.