"It was a very accurate, respectful celebration of a complex and extraordinary man." That is how Stanley Fleishman's one-time law partner described Sunday's funeral at which hundreds paid their final respects to the man whose arguments before the Supreme Court helped yank American society's view of sexually-oriented and other controversial literature and art inside out beginning over four decades ago.
"There are certain human beings in society whose contributions either alone or with others irrevocably change either fundamental aspects or fundamental ways our society looks at itself," says John Westin, a Los Angeles-area attorney who partnered with Fleishman in the 1970s. "In many ways, Stanley's work and belief and, in the early days especially, his sheer force of will and courage, forever changed the way American society would deal with sex in the media."
In a telephone interview Monday morning, Westin recalled seven cases which their partnership argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, focusing especially on Kaplan v. California, which the team came to within one vote of winning.
Fleishman made the argument to the Court, Westin remembers, taking the position that so long as the audience was willing adults alone and there was reasonable protection for juveniles, the First Amendment meant government should not be concerned with the content of films, books, and other adult-oriented entertainment - as long as the materials were transmitted and engaged discreetly.
"What made it extraordinary was that we came one vote away from winning," Westin says, "and, had we won, then all the obscenity prosecutions of the 1970s and 1980s, and even the early 1990s, would not have been possible - all of those were consenting adult, discreet transactions."
