Law Commons^™

Six Conservatives In Search Of The First Amendment: The Revealing Case Of Nude Dancing, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

The future of political freedom in the United States hardly turns on whether women have a First Amendment right to dance in the nude in bars and peep shows. The future of artistic freedom is perhaps implicated by this question, but only if the law's demand for general principle prohibits judges from treating expressive nudity in those environments as fundamentally different from expressive nudity in ballet performances, museum exhibitions, and films. Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. is an interesting and potentially important case not because of the significance of the specific issue it decided, but because it provoked a lively …