Decision of the Court

Decision of the Court
The final decision of the court came to be five to four with the majority deciding to uphold the Indiana statue of indecent exposure. The majority justices were Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O’Connor, Justice Kennedy, Justice Scalia, and Justice Souter whom came to this conclusion. Thus, the public indecency statute furthers a substantial government interest in protecting order and morality. This interest is unrelated to the suppression of free expression. Some may view restricting nudity on moral grounds as necessarily related to expression. We disagree. It can be argued, of course, that almost limitless types of conduct -- including appearing in the nude in public -- are "expressive," and in one sense of the word this is true. People who go about in the nude in public may be expressing something about themselves by so doing. But the court rejected this expansive notion of "expressive conduct" in O'Brien, saying: "We cannot accept the view that an apparently limitless variety of conduct can be labeled 'speech' whenever the person engaging in the conduct intends thereby to express an idea." http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/barnes.html The ones against the majority were Justice White, Justice Marshall, Justice Blackmun, and Justice Stevens. The dissenters pointed out that far from being merely a restriction on “time, place, or manner,” the Indiana la was intended to prevent customers in establishments such as Glen Theatre form being exposed to the sensuality and eroticism that were the essence of the dancers’ expression. http://law.jrank.org/pages/12825/Barnes-v-Glen-Theatre-Inc.html