4.2.12 WC: 191694 Iam Curious Yellow My initial professional encounter with the First Amendment involved a direct challenge to the concept of offensiveness in the context of a Swedish anti-war film called I Am Curious Yellow. The story involved a young girl coming-of-age both politically and sexually during the Vietnam War. It included several scenes in which she was nude and engaged in sexual activities. By today’s standards, it could be shown on cable television and in art theater with an R rating, but in the late 1960s, it was scandalous. (The young girl who played the lead role, and also starred in an Ingmar Bergmann film, recently died at the age of 66, thus bringing home to me how much time had passed). The film was seized by US Customs and banned throughout the country. Grove Press, a radical publishing house in New York, owned the film and retained me to argue for its protection under the First Amendment. I don’t recall whether I charged a small fee or whether I took the case pro bono, but I put everything I had into my new found role as part time litigator on behalf of my beloved First Amendment. I decided on a bold challenge to the traditional power of the government to censor obscene material—indeed to censor any “offensive” material shown only to people who aren’t offended by it. Instead of arguing that the film itself was not obscene, I decided to argue that it was none of the government’s constitutional business to act as a board of censors—to tell its adult citizens what they could and could not watch in the privacy of a movie theater that was off limits to children and that did not advertise in a pandering manner that would reasonably offend people outside the theater. There was no legal binding precedent for such a challenge. Indeed the Supreme Court had just recently reaffirmed the power of the government to ban and prosecute obscenity, as an exception to the freedom of speech. In this respect, my bold and unprecedented challenge was much like the