The Obscenity Bargain: Ralph Ginzburg for Fanny Hill

The next‐to‐the‐last witness at the July 1968 hearings on the nomination of Abe Fortas to replace Earl Warren as Chief Justice was James Clancy. Along with another attorney, Charles Keating, who would later gain infamy in the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, Clancy appeared on behalf of Citizens for Decent Literature, an anti‐smut organization that had filed amicus briefs supporting censorship “as essential to the development of good family living” ¹ in the Supreme Court's important obscenity decisions. ² Clancy asserted that everyone should see the materials Fortas had held were entitled to First Amendment protection, and so he had assembled a thirty‐minute compilation of them for the Judiciary Committee's viewing.