How Do Rights Revolutions Occur? Free Speech and the First Amendment
Daniel L. Chen,
Susan Yeh
Abstract:Does obscenity law corrode moral values and does it matter? Using random judge assignment and all U.S. obscenity precedents since 1958, we present four main results. Progressive laws liberalized sexual attitudes and behaviors, reduced child abuse, but increased asymptomatic STDs. We document that newspapers reported on obscenity cases. We then assign data entry workers to transcribe randomly allocated newsreports and find that exposure to progressive law shifts attitudes. Second-order norm shifts are consisten… Show more
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.