The United States attorney representing the Post Office, S. Hazard Gillespie Jr., thought Rembar had misread the law, and he recited a clause of the Roth ruling that Rembar had omitted. Justice Brennan had written that controversial ideas “have the full protection” of the First Amendment  “unless,” Gillespie underlined, these ideas were “excludable because they encroach upon the limited area of more important interests.” One of those interests, surely, was keeping obscenity under wraps. Hence Rembar’s argument was irrelevant.

This was, however, just the rebuttal Rembar was hoping for. He pointed out a footnote in which Brennan elaborated on what kind of “more important interests” were “excludable.” All of them involved actions  peddling, picketing, parading without a license, playing loud music from a truck. The First Amendment didn’t protect any of that. But none of Brennan’s examples involved writing  expression unattached to conduct. Pure expression could be forbidden, Rembar argued, only if it was “utterly without social importance.”

On July 21, 1959, Judge Bryan ruled in favor of Grove Press and ordered the Post Office to lift all restrictions on sending copies of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” through the mail. This, in effect, marked the end of the Post Office’s authority  which, until then, it held absolutely  to declare a work of literature “obscene” or to impound copies of those works or prosecute their publishers. This wasn’t exactly the end of obscenity as a criminal category. Into the mid-1960s, Barney Rosset would wage battles in various state courts over William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” other Grove novels now widely regarded as classics. But the “Chatterley” case established the principle that allowed free speech its total victory.

The Post Office did appeal Judge Bryan’s verdict; a panel of three judges upheld it unanimously. The government’s lawyers decided not to appeal further to the Supreme Court. They knew that they would lose  that the justices who, just two years earlier, had excluded this sort of literature from constitutional protection would now change their minds. They knew that Rembar’s creative view of Justice Brennan’s opinion  a view that Brennan had not explicitly considered when he wrote it  was logically unassailable.

The case also made clear that laws are more complex than strike zones or foul lines, which is why the analogy between judges and umpires is so misleading.

The distinction is sharpened by another argument Rembar made during the “Lady Chatterley” trial. “A novel, no matter how much devoted to the act of sex,” he said, “can hardly add to the constant sexual prodding with which our environment assails us.” In the mass media of the day, with its appeals to a booming youth market, movies and advertisements were often “calculated to produce sexual thoughts and reactions,” to the point where “we live in a sea of sexual provocation.”