Misc.: Paul Robert Cohen

The name, but not the face of young Paul Robert Cohen enjoyed brief celebrity in 1971 in the court case Cohen v. California.

Cohen, 19, had brought into a courthouse a jacket bearing words that suggested crudely what should be done to the military draft. He did not wear the jacket with its use of the big F-word in the courtroom itself, but once he left the room, he donned the garment and was arrested.

Cohen was convicted at trial, and an appeals court affirmed that judgment. The California Supreme Court refused to take the further appeal, but the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and reversed, 5-4.

In one of the most oft-repeated lines to come out of the High Court in a long time, Justice Harlan wrote: "One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric."

The four-man court minority position was that wearing the jacket was more nearly conduct than speech and hence not protected under the First Amendment. At that juncture, the Supreme Court had not yet decided that darn near everything a person might do constituted symbolic, protected speech.