Can Moving Pictures Speak?: Film, Speech, and Social Science in Early Twentieth-Century Law

This article revisits the key 1915 Mutual v. Ohio legal decision, which endorsed censorship of film in the United States. Placing the decision in the context of two other related decisions (Kalem Co. v. Harper Bros. [1911] and Pathé Exchange v. Cobb [1922]) highlights the importance of the Supreme Court justices’ conception of the nature of film as more akin to physical action than to opinion and expression. The article locates this conception in contemporaneous popular discourse on technology and the social scientific discourse on influence.