This is all interesting, but let’s recall that Jacobellis v. Ohio was not the last Supreme Court ruling on this! The important subsequent case was Miller v. California:
the Court acknowledged “the inherent dangers of undertaking to regulate any form of expression”, and said that “State statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited.”[1] The Court, in an attempt to set such limits, devised a set of three criteria which must be met for a media item to be legitimately subjected to state regulatory bans:
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 an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law; and
This test clarified the definition of obscenity originally set out in the Memoirs precedent.[6] This three-part analysis became known as the Miller test.[2]
The Miller ruling, and particularly the resulting Miller test, was the Supreme Court’s first comprehensive explication of obscene material that does not qualify for First Amendment protection and thus can be banned by governmental authorities with criminal charges for those who distribute it. Furthermore, due to the three-part test’s stringent requirements, very few types of content can now be completely banned, and material that is appropriate for consenting adults can only be partially restricted per delivery method.[13]
I recommend reading the linked page in its entirety. In short, the conclusion of later Supreme Courts was that Justice Stewart’s standard does not suffice, and that there need to be actual rules. Those rules have been created, and have greatly improved the state of free speech protections in the United States, precisely by both limiting the scope of what sorts of actions are out of bounds, and by creating greater clarity about what sorts of actions are out of bounds.
This is all interesting, but let’s recall that Jacobellis v. Ohio was not the last Supreme Court ruling on this! The important subsequent case was Miller v. California:
I recommend reading the linked page in its entirety. In short, the conclusion of later Supreme Courts was that Justice Stewart’s standard does not suffice, and that there need to be actual rules. Those rules have been created, and have greatly improved the state of free speech protections in the United States, precisely by both limiting the scope of what sorts of actions are out of bounds, and by creating greater clarity about what sorts of actions are out of bounds.