Jeremy Hutchinson, Who Argued Some Of The Most Important Court Cases In Britain’s Cultural History, Dead At 102

He was one of the two attorneys whose groundbreaking defense prevailed in the 1960 obscenity trial of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover; eleven years later, he won a more difficult case against Paul Ableman’s The Mouth and Oral Sex, establishing the “literary merit” argument. “He added a service to the arts by ending the cultural vandalism of Mary Whitehouse, whose attempt in 1982 to prosecute the National Theatre for staging Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain collapsed after his (and the Old Bailey’s) most remarkable cross-examination.”