The Volokh Conspiracy

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Copyright

First Supreme Court Opinion to Contain Nudes (in Color, Yet, and 3 of Them)?

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


That's today's dissent in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, written by Justice Kagan and joined by Chief Justice Roberts (see pdf pp. 81-83). But I read the U.S. Reports only for the articles.

Note that at least one lower court decision, Cariou v. Prince [not the same Prince] (2d Cir. 2013), anticipated this. Law review articles had done the same, I'm sure (I did, for instance, in my Thinking Ahead About Freedom of Speech and Hostile Work Environment Harassment, 17 Berkeley J. Emp. & Lab. L. 305 (1996)), but I believe the Warhol dissent was the first Supreme Court decision to do this. Please let me know if there's some other precedent I've missed.

Eugene Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA and a Visiting Fellow (Senior Fellow starting May 2024) at the Hoover Institution (Stanford). Naturally, his posts here (like the opinions of the other bloggers) are his own, and not endorsed by any educational institution.