Cohen vs. California Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Fragrance

 CBLDF is proud to present the new Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab fragrance Cohen v. California!  Based upon the landmark First Amendment case that explicitly acknowledged profanity as protected speech, Cohen v. California celebrates the notion that "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric". This special premiere is accompanied by an all-new signed and numbered print by Beanworld creator Larry Marder!

This premiere edition of Cohen v. California is strictly limited to 50 pieces.

About COHEN V. CALIFORNIA

In April of 1968, Paul Robert Cohen was arrested for wearing a jacket emblazoned with "Fuck the Draft" inside a Los Angeles County Courthouse. He was convicted of violating California Penal Code 415, prohibiting "maliciously and willfully disturb[ing] the peace or quiet of any neighborhood or person [by] offensive conduct", and was sentenced to thirty days imprisonment.

In affirming the conviction, California's Court of Appeal held that offensive conduct translates to "behavior which has a tendency to provoke others to acts of violence or to in turn disturb the peace", and that "it was certainly reasonably foreseeable that such conduct might cause others to rise up to commit a violent act against the person of the defendant or attempt to forcibly remove his jacket".

However, the US Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari, and the case went off to the highest court in the land. The Court held, by a vote of 5-4, that "Absent a more particularized and compelling reason for its actions, the State may not, consistently with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, make the simple public display of this single four-letter expletive a criminal offense." The Court denied the State the broad power to control its citizens in the name of creating a clean, civil society through the censorship of public discourse: "[T]he issue flushed by this case stands out in bold relief. It is whether California can excise, as 'offensive conduct', one particular scurrilous epithet from the public discourse, either upon the theory . . . that its use is inherently likely to cause violent reaction or upon a more general assertion that the States, acting as guardians of public morality, may properly remove this offensive word from the public vocabulary."

One man's vulgarity is another's lyric: black tea, apricot, honey, saffron, apple blossom, tolu balsam, ginger grass, white ginger root, and vetiver.