They tend to affirm Congress even when it might go against there own opinions. Interpretivist believe in trying to determine the meaning of the Constitution and its provisions by trying to understand what the framers intended. Noninterpretivist believe that there is no way of knowing what the intentions of the framers was, so therefore they use their own judgement in the rulings. To find out what type of court was in session in 1964, I researched the cases using Lexis Nexis, several websites unique to there respective cases, Refdesk.com, and the Supreme Court's webpage. After doing the research, I found that the court was both restrainist and interpretivist in the observed cases. We will now explain why it was such, and layout the facts of the cases. .
II. Interpretivist.
The first case is Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964). In the case, Nico Jacobellis, a manager at a movie theatre in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, was convicted on two counts of possessing and exhibiting a film that violated the Ohio state statute on obscenity. The Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed on the grounds that the obscenity statute was constitutional and that the evidence sustained the conviction. On appeal, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed, but the six Justices voting for reversal were unable to agree upon an opinion in support of the decision. They stated that the constitutional test for obscenity is "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest." They said that under this test, a community standard is a national standard. They ruled that under the constitutional test, the film was not obscene. They went on to state that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, criminal obscenity laws are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography, and that the film in question was not as such.
