The 1986 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography Report (the 1986 Commission) is an important, yet puzzling, document. It is important because of the significance of the pornography issue, and because the Commission contributes to our understanding of pornography. The Commission is puzzling, however, because its conclusions appear simultaneously reasonable and unreasonable. Despite the condemnations of the press (on grounds of runaway censorship), the final report was actually cautious and restrained in many respects. The Commission limited its recommendations for censorship to what it considered the most degrading forms of pornography, and refused to endorse legal prohibitions that went beyond the scope of the traditional “obscenity” exception to the First Amendment. But the Commission also expressed a strong concern about the harms that pornography might engender. Given the eruption of violent and other questionable forms of pornography in recent years, this concern is hardly unreasonable. Furthermore, recent polls show that a majority of Americans favor restricting violent forms of pornography. In these respects the Commission's efforts appear to embody a committed, yet balanced, approach that considered different values (what Max Weber termed the ethic of responsibility).

Pornography is notoriously hard to define, yet like the Supreme Court all of us think we know it when we see it. Even if we cannot define pornography, we can say if something is or is not pornographic. How do we do this? More precisely, what is it that we think we know, when we think that something is or is not pornographic? We make these experiential determinations by reference to what I call our “traditional conception” of pornography. This conception is not based on definitions of pornography, for we have none. Rather, the traditional conception consists of broadly stated and widely believed inductive generalizations, which are in turn based on a multitude of common and shared experiences with pornographic materials. Recently—in the last ten years or so—that traditional conception of pornography has begun to change. But it is changing slowly. It still dominates our sense of what is and is not pornographic and our arguments about the value of pornography.

The Attorney General's Commission on Pornography was asked by the president of the United States to “review the available empirical evidence on the relationship between exposure to pornographic materials and antisocial behavior [and to explore] possible roles and initiatives that the Department of Justice and agencies of local, State, and federal government could pursue in controlling, consistent with constitutional guarantees, the production and distribution of pornography” (at 216). The Commission undertook this review during several public meetings held across the country in 1986 and, as a result of the review, concluded that there is a causal relationship between exposure to many forms of pornography and several harmful effects including increased levels of violence against women. The Commission called for stricter enforcement of existing obscenity laws and serious consideration of additional legal measures. These measures include amending the federal obscenity laws to prohibit the transmission of obscene material through the telephone and eliminating the “utterly without redeeming value” clause found in some state obscenity statutes. In all, the Commission made 92 recommendations involving changes in existing federal, state, and local obscenity laws. Without exception, the recommendations for legal changes call for greater restrictions on sexually explicit material and more stringent enforcement of current obscenity law.

As the very title of John Mackie's The Cement of the Universe reminds us, causation permeates and holds together our lives, our language, and our laws. Causal claims are part of our everyday discourse, causal assumptions undergird many of our actions, and causal relationships lie at the heart of that large body of laws presupposing such a relationship between the immediate regulatory target and some more foundational governmental concern. Not unexpectedly, the omnipresence of causal relationships and the pervasiveness of our concern with them have generated multiple conceptions of what it is for something to be the cause of something else. Insofar as these various conceptions are cabined within the domains in which they have been developed, and for which they are most useful, little harm comes from mutually coexisting but different conceptions of causation. Yet the inevitable and desirable leakage among disciplines, and among professional, political, and public domains, has as an unfortunate byproduct an increased risk of conceptual confusion as strikingly different conceptions of causation are misleadingly referred to under the same rubric in the same domain.

Over the past few years, bar officials have increasingly called for a “rekindling” of lawyer professionalism. Perhaps the most forceful of these calls was sounded by former Chief Justice Warren Burger, in an oft-quoted speech he gave to the 1984 American Bar Association meeting in Las Vegas. There he chastised the profession for what he viewed as recent departures from “professional standards and traditions of the bar [which] in the past served to restrain members of the profession from practices and customs common and acceptable in the rough-and-tumble of the marketplace.” In particular, the former Chief Justice cited the absence until recently of lawyer advertising and solicitation, noting that “to those who still regard the practice of law as a profession of service-with high public obligations, rather than as a trade in the marketplace-the professional standards against advertising are still widely observed.” Although conceding that some developments in “higher lawyer visibility”, such as “store-front, street-level offices of so-called legal clinic" actually benefit the public, Burger nonetheless maintained that advertising and other commercial practices as well as a number of other abuses (such as an “excess of adversary zeal”) have resulted in a sharp decline in public confidence, as measured by some opinion polls.