Fortas’s pornography rulings were used to attack the Warren court.

Evidence

In the Fortas nomination, Senate conservatives found a way to attack the liberal Warren court. Their weapon would be Fortas’s rulings on pornography. A print of Flaming Creatures confiscated in Ann Arbor in January was flown to Washington, DC, at the behest of Senator Strom Thurmond, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1386

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the shelf’s other mid-century censorship and moral-panic material; Fortas’s collapse as an early culture-war skirmish.
• SEED: A short essay on ‘the court as culture-war battlefield’: Strom Thurmond weaponizing an underground film print to kill a Supreme Court nominee.