The First Amendment attorney who fought and won perhaps the most groundbreaking obscenity case of the 1950s has died. Los Angeles attorney Stanley Fleishman died Thursday of complications from surgery to remove a benign tumor.
Although some who knew Fleishman say the 79-year-old civil rights specialist had lost the hop off his fast ball in the last decade or so, they also agree he was one of the best in the business at his peak.
"He was a giant among giants," says Beverly Hills attorney Paul Cambria, who first met Fleishman a quarter-century ago. "A real pioneer, if you will, in the whole First Amendment area…we should be sorry that we won't have his voice in our courtrooms anymore."
"He was a wonderful, gracious man," says Ron Braverman, owner of the Doc Johnson adult novelty business, who was audibly shocked to learn of Fleishman's death. "And he was deeply, deeply entrenched in fighting for the rights of people. All people. American people."
The polio-stricken Fleishman - whose usual courtroom appearance involved supporting himself on crutches - won numerous victories at the bar, both on behalf of the First Amendment and the rights of the handicapped. But he made his bones irrevocably and most profoundly in the Roth obscenity case.
That 1957 case led to a Supreme Court ruling in which three criteria for defining obscenity were outlined and began to close the door by which one could simply say they knew obscenity when they saw it - as many communities, in effect, did.
Fleishman defended publisher Harold Roth, whose literature had been ruled obscene and was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court in 1957. In Roth, the Court ruled published material could be defined as obscene if it depicted or described sexual conduct in a patently offensive manner, appealed to the prurient interest, or had no apparent redeeming literary, social, or political value.
A subsequent Court case modified the latter by saying it was so as a "reasonable person" might conclude. In between, however, one of the most heralded literary cases to win in the courts in the wake of Roth was William S. Burrough's surreal novel, Naked Lunch, in which the literati from poet Allen Ginsberg to novelist/journalist Norman Mailer and beyond testified that it wasn't obscene.
Fleishman ultimately received numerous honors from the adult entertainment and publishing industry, including the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award for lifetime achievement. Among the better-known such works.
But Fleishman is almost as well known for his work on behalf of the handicapped. He fought cases to put the handicapped on court juries, on buses, on aircraft, and in public buildings as well as private businesses. And the Independent Living Center of Southern California honored him with a lifetime achievement award as well.
Cambria remembers Fleishman as a distinguishing and commanding courtroom presence as well as an acute Constitutional mind. "There was something about him - he had this kind of courtroom elegance regardless of his handicap," Cambria says. "Very articulate. Very powerful speaker."
"He might have lost a bit," says Cambria of Fleishman's final decade, "but he was still there. Still in the fight. It happens to everyone, how do you gauge that, I guess it depends on who's doing the gauging. But the last time I saw him, a few years ago, and he was still sharp, tough, and tenacious. As charming as he was, he was very tenacious."
The Los Angeles Times says public funeral services are scheduled for Sunday afternoon at 12:30 p.m. at Leo Baeck Temple on North Sepulveda Blvd. in Brentwood.
