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Community standards

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As a legal term in the United States, community standards arose from a test to determine whether material is or is not obscene as explicated in the 1957 Supreme Court decision in the matter of Roth v. United States. In its 6–3 decision written by William J. Brennan Jr., the court held that material being obscene depended upon "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest." With its emphasis on the reaction of an average person rather than that of an especially susceptible person, the court rejected applying the Hicklin test as a means of determining whether material is obscene, and the ruling represented a liberalization of the nation's obscenity laws.