What is the legal definition of obscenity?
The U.S. Supreme Court set up a test for obscenity in its 1973 decision Miller v. California. The Court provided three "basic guidelines":

· "Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.

· "Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law.

· "Whether the work, taken as whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

These different guidelines are sometimes called the prurient-interest, patently offensive and serious-value prongs of the Miller test.

Can a book, videotape or other expressive material be considered obscene on the basis of one particular passage or scene?
No, the work must be considered as a whole in determining whether it has serious value. In the Court's 2002 decision in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that this was an "essential First Amendment rule: The artistic merit of a work does not depend on the presence of a single explicit scene."

Until the mid-20th century, many American courts did find that a single sexually explicit passage in a book could make the material obscene. These courts relied on the Hicklin rule, developed from a 19th century English case, Regina v. Hicklin. Under the Hicklin test, obscenity could be found based on even one isolated passage. The test asked "whether the tendency of the matter is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."

Can a city completely prohibit adult-entertainment businesses from operating?
No. But a city may enact reasonable zoning measures that relegate adult businesses to a certain area or areas of town. Similarly, a city may zone adult businesses by dispersing them throughout a city.

Cities may also pass restrictions that regulate how live entertainment is performed. For example, courts have allowed cities to require nude dancers to wear at least some clothing during their performances.

But a city may not completely prohibit adult entertainment. In its 1981 decision Schad v. Borough of Mount Ephraim, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a town in New Jersey could not ban live adult performance dancing within its borders. "By excluding live entertainment throughout the Borough, the Mount Ephraim ordinance prohibits a wide range of expression that has long been held to be within the protections of the First and Fourteenth Amendments," the high court wrote.

The Supreme Court distinguished between a zoning law that restricted the location of adult businesses and a law that completely prohibited certain types of expressive conduct.

Can a city prohibit totally nude dancing?
Yes, the U.S. Supreme Court has twice ruled that a city or state can prohibit totally nude dancing. In its 1991 decision Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., the high court upheld an Indiana public-indecency law prohibiting public nudity. Then, in its 2000 decision City of Erie v. Pap's A.M., the high court upheld a similar city law prohibiting public nudity. By its terms, the ordinance regulates conduct alone. "It does not target nudity that contains an erotic message," the Court wrote. "Rather, it bans all public nudity, regardless of whether that nudity is accompanied by expressive activity."

The high court determined that a city could prohibit totally nude dancing based on the secondary-effects rationale. "The State's interest in preventing harmful secondary effects is not related to the suppression of expression," the Court wrote.