Laura Wittern-Keller, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University at Albany (SUNY) where she teaches U.S. legal and constitutional history, urban history and the Civil War era. She has written “Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship” (2008) and “The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court,” which was co-authored with cultural historian Raymond J. Haberski Jr.. She also has written book chapters in “Silencing Cinema” (2013) and “Hollywood and the Law” (2015), and has served as on-air consultant to the documentary “Sickies Making Films” (2018).

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Freedman v. Maryland (1965)

Freedman v. Maryland (1965) ruled that prior restraint under a state film censorship statute unduly restricted the First Amendment rights of film exhibitors.