The lawyer Charles Rembar, who died on October 24th aged 85, won some of the most important censorship cases in America, defending the publishers of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic Of Cancer and Fanny Hill. In each case, he argued that the artistic merit of the books outweighed any possible obscenity and should be protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
When he set up his practice in New York, after serving in the second World War, one of his first clients was his cousin, Norman Mailer, whose novel, The Naked And The Dead (1948), had its publishers worried about earthy expletives. Charles Rembar suggested "fug" was a phonetically close, but legally safe, alternative.
Later, he became involved in a legal wrangle over another Mailer novel, The Deer Park (1955). It had been accepted for publication, and typeset, by Rinehart & Co, who then decided it was unpublishable because it was obscene. The publishers subsequently claimed the obscenity of the book made the contract invalid. Charles Rembar disagreed. Faced with a potentially costly suit, Rinehart paid Mailer his contracted advance and let the book go to G.P. Putnam's Sons, where it became a bestseller.
The Lady Chatterley trials began in 1959 when Grove Press, always at the forefront of publishing contentious or avant-garde literature in America, produced an unexpurgated edition of D.H. Lawrence's novel, which was, at the time, banned in the US in all but a bowdlerised version.
Copies sold via the Readers Subscription Book Club were detained by the American postal authorities (which they were, arguably, entitled to do under the 19th-century Comstock Act). After arguing their case within the post office's own judiciary system - and losing - Charles Rembar and Grove filed a suit against the New York city postmaster. The courts found in favour of Grove Press, and an appeal brought by the federal government affirmed the decision. In England, Penguin Books followed Grove's lead and, in 1960, successfully defended Lady Chatterley's honour in one of Britain's most celebrated court cases.
In 1961, Grove was in even deeper trouble with Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Rather than defending a single summons, the publishers found themselves helping to defend more than 60 cases brought against booksellers throughout the US. In 1965, Putnam's publication of John Cleland's Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill, saw Charles Rembar defending the book all the way to the US Supreme Court. With the overturning of a temporary restraint against the book in New York, sales rocketed, but Charles Rembar found himself on more uncertain ground when he tried to argue the literary merit of the book and its author's intent in writing it.
In the mid-18th century, Cleland, broke and facing debtor's prison, had written the novel and sold it outright for £20 sterling, which made any attempted defence that he had crafted the novel with serious literary intentions patently absurd. The eventual decision of the Supreme Court was six to three in the publisher's favour.
Charles Rembar's book on these cases, optimistically titled The End Of Obscenity (1968), was a mixture of court testimony, history and sharp, sometimes amusing, asides into the history of American law. It won the George Polk Memorial Award for the best book of 1968. Charles Rembar was no mean writer, contributing to the Atlantic Monthly, New Republic and Esquire magazines. His collection of essays, Perspective, appeared in 1975, and, five years later, came a history of the evolving American legal system, The Law Of The Land.
In the latter, Charles Rembar incisively explained the most complex laws, complaining that "for centuries, our lawyers, a priestly caste, used a mysterious tongue, composed of Latin, French, English, incantation and a bit of mumbling. These continue, more or less, to the present day - Latin less, English more, French absorbed, incantation down a bit, mumbling steady". He had a shrewd ear for a soundbite, none better than his claim that "pornography is in the groin of the beholder".
The son of a hotelier, Charles Rembar was raised in New Jersey and educated at Harvard and Columbia University law school. Before the war, he worked for the New Deal agencies and the Office of Price Administration in Washington. As well as his work in court, he also represented many leading literary figures, including Mailer, Herman Wouk, Saul Steinberg and Tom Clancy.
Until he fell ill last July, Charles Rembar continued to attend his New York practice every day. He is survived by his wife and two sons.
Charles Rembar: born 1915; died, October 2000