Quantity of Books v. Kansas

Quantity of Books v. Kansas
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 1–2, 1964 Decided June 22, 1964
Full case name	A Quantity of Copies of Books et al. v. Kansas
Citations	378 U.S. 205 (more) 84 S. Ct. 1723; 12 L. Ed. 2d 809
Argument	Oral argument
Opinion announcement	Opinion announcement
Case history
Prior	Forfeiture granted, Geary District Court, unreported, 1961; order affirmed, 191 Kan. 13, 379 P. 2d 254 (Kansas Supreme Court, 1961)
Subsequent	cert granted, 388 U.S. 452 (1967), 87 S. Ct. 2104, 18 L. Ed. 2d 1314
Holding
Mass seizure of allegedly obscene works without prior adversary hearing to determine obscenity was procedurally deficient to protect First Amendment interests. Kansas Supreme Court reversed and remanded.
Court membership
Chief Justice Earl Warren Associate Justices Hugo Black · William O. Douglas Tom C. Clark · John M. Harlan II William J. Brennan Jr. · Potter Stewart Byron White · Arthur Goldberg
Case opinions
Majority	Brennan, joined by Warren, White, Goldberg
Concurrence	Black, joined by Douglas
Concurrence	Stewart
Dissent	Harlan, joined by Clark
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amends. I, XIV

Quantity of Books v. Kansas, 378 U.S. 205 (1964), is an in rem United States Supreme Court decision on First Amendment questions relating to the forfeiture of obscene material. By a 7–2 margin, the Court held that a seizure of the books was unconstitutional, since no hearing had been held on whether the books were obscene, and it reversed a Kansas Supreme Court decision that upheld the seizure.

The case arose several years earlier when police in Junction City, Kansas raided an adult bookstore. The state's Attorney General, William M. Ferguson, had previously filed an information with the county court listing 51 titles published by Nightstand Books as allegedly obscene; at the bookstore, 31 of those titles found, and 1,175 books were seized. These procedures were believed to be in keeping with the Supreme Court's recent Marcus v. Search Warrant decision, which held that some sort of judicial review was necessary to determine if seized material was obscene prior to seizure.

Justice William Brennan wrote for a four-justice plurality that considered the case strictly on procedural grounds, without reaching the question of the books' obscenity. It could, he said, operate as a form of prior restraint. In one of two separate concurrences, Justice Hugo Black reaffirmed his earlier blanket opposition to all legal suppression of obscenity, in which he was joined by William O. Douglas. Justice Potter Stewart said that the books in question were not hardcore pornography, which was the only material that he could consider holding to be unprotected by the First Amendment in Quantity of Books's companion case, Jacobellis v. Ohio (where he had also defined it with his oft-quoted line "I know it when I see it").

In dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote for himself and Tom Clark in faulting Brennan's application of the precedents he relied on. He also disputed whether the procedure was truly prior restraint, since it did not review the material prior to publication. The Court, he concluded, was unfairly denying Kansas the full range of legal tools it might otherwise have had to pursue if it had decided it was an important state interest.^{[clarification needed]}