What follows is an opinion from the Supreme Court of the United States. Your task is to determine the treatment the court whose decision the Supreme Court reviewed accorded the decision of the court it reviewed, that is, whether the court below the Supreme Court (typically a federal court of appeals or a state supreme court) affirmed, reversed, remanded, denied or dismissed the decision of the court it reviewed (typically a trial court). Adhere to the language used in the "holding" in the summary of the case on the title page or prior to Part I of the Court's opinion. Exceptions to the literal language are the following: where the Court overrules the lower court, treat this a petition or motion granted; where the court whose decision the Supreme Court is reviewing refuses to enforce or enjoins the decision of the court, tribunal, or agency which it reviewed, treat this as reversed; where the court whose decision the Supreme Court is reviewing enforces the decision of the court, tribunal, or agency which it reviewed, treat this as affirmed; where the court whose decision the Supreme Court is reviewing sets aside the decision of the court, tribunal, or agency which it reviewed, treat this as vacated; if the decision is set aside and remanded, treat it as vacated and remanded.

HAMLING et al. v. UNITED STATES
No. 73-507.
Argued April 15, 1974
Decided June 24, 1974
Stanley Fleishman argued the cause for petitioners Hamling et al. With him on the briefs was Sam Rosen-wein. Mr. Rosenwein argued the cause for petitioners Kemp et al. With him on the briefs were Mr. Fleishman and Louis S. Katz.
Allan Abbott Tuttle argued the cause for the United States. With him on the brief were Solicitor General Bork, Assistant Attorney General Petersen, Jerome M. Feit, and Shirley Baccus-Lobel.
Briefs of amici curiae urging reversal were filed by Melvin L. Wulf, Joel M. Gora, and Fred Okrand for the American Civil Liberties Union et al.; by Ira M. MUlstein for the Association of American Publishers, Inc,; and by William D. North for the American Library Assn.
Mr. Justice Rbhnquist
delivered the opinion of the Court.
On March 5, 1971, a grand jury in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California indicted petitioners William L. Hamling, Earl Kemp, Shirley R. Wright, David L. Thomas, Reed Enterprises, Inc., and Library Service, Inc., on 21 counts of an indictment charging use of the mails to carry an obscene book, The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, and an obscene advertisement, which gave information as to where, how, and from whom and by what means the Illustrated Report might be obtained, and of conspiracy to commit the above offenses, in violation of 18 U. S. C. §§ 2, 371, and 1461. Prior to trial, petitioners moved to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that it failed to inform them of the charges, and that the grand jury had insufficient evidence before it to return an indictment and was improperly instructed on the law. Petitioners also challenged the petit jury panel and moved to strike the venire on the ground that there had been an unconstitutional exclusion of all persons under 25 years of age. The District Court denied all of these motions.
Following a jury trial, petitioners were convicted on 12 counts of mailing and conspiring to mail the obscene advertisement. On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed. 481 F. 2d 307 (1973). The jury was unable to reach a verdict with regard to the counts of the indictment which charged the mailing of the allegedly obscene Illustrated Report. The advertisement found obscene is a single sheet brochure mailed to approximately 55,000 persons in various parts of the United States; one side of the brochure contains a collage of photographs from the Illus-strated Report; the other side gives certain information and an order blank from which the Illustrated Report could be ordered.
The Court of Appeals accurately described the photographs in the brochure as follows:
“The folder opens to a full page splash of pictures portraying heterosexual and homosexual intercourse, sodomy and a variety of deviate sexual acts. Specifically, a group picture of nine persons, one male engaged in masturbation, a female masturbating two males, two couples engaged in intercourse in reverse fashion while one female participant engages in fellatio of a male; a second group picture of six persons, two males masturbating, two fellatrices practicing the act, each bearing a clear depiction of ejaculated seminal fluid on their faces; two persons with the female engaged in the act of fellatio and the male in female masturbation by hand; two separate pictures of males engaged in cunnilinction; a film strip of six frames depicting lesbian love scenes including a cunnilinguist in action and female masturbation with another’s hand and a vibrator, and two frames, one depicting a woman mouthing the penis of a horse, and a second poising the same for entrance into her vagina.” 481 F. 2d, at 316-317.
The reverse side of the brochure contains a facsimile of the Illustrated Report’s cover, and an order form for the Illustrated Report. It also contains the following language:
“THANKS A LOT, MR. PRESIDENT. A monumental work of research and investigation has now become a giant of a book. All the facts, all the statistics, presented in the best possible format . . . and . . . completely illustrated in black and white and full color. Every facet of the most controversial public report ever issued is covered in detail.
“The book is a MUST for the research shelves of every library, public or private, seriously concerned with full intellectual freedom and adult selection. “Millions of dollars in public funds were expended to determine the PRECISE TRUTH about eroticism in the United States today, yet every possible attempt to suppress this information was made from the very highest levels.
“Even the President dismissed the facts, out of hand. The attempt to suppress this volume is an inexcusable insult directed at every adult in this country. Each individual MUST be allowed to make his own decision; the facts are inescapable. Many adults, MANY OF THEM, will do just that after reading this REPORT. In a truly free society, a book like this wouldn’t even be necessary.”
The Court of Appeals indicated that the actual report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography is an official Government document printed by the United States Government Printing Office. The major difference between the Illustrated Report, charged to be obscene in the indictment, and the actual report is that the Illustrated Report contained illustrations, which the publishers of the Illustrated Report said were included “ ‘as examples of the type of subject matter discussed and the type of material shown to persons who were part of the research projects engaged in for the Commission as basis for their Report.’ ” 481 F. 2d, at 315.
The facts adduced at trial showed that postal patrons in various parts of the country received the brochure advertising the Illustrated Report. The mailings these persons received consisted of an outer envelope, an inner return envelope addressed to Library Service, Inc., at a post office box in San Diego, California, and the brochure itself, which also identified Library Service, Inc., at the same address, as the party responsible for the mailing. The outer envelopes bore a postmark that indicated they were mailed from North Hollywood, California, on or about January 12, 1971, and that the postage was affixed to the envelopes by a Pitney-Bowes meter number.
The mailing of these brochures was accomplished by petitioners through the use of other businesses. Approximately 55,000-58,000 of these brochures were placed in envelopes, and postage was affixed to them by one Richard and one Yenita Harte, who operate the Academy Addressing and Mailing Service. The brochures and the Pitney-Bowes meter number, with which they affixed the postage, were supplied to them by one Bernard Lieberman of Regent House, Inc., of North Hollywood, California, who, on January 11, 1971, had paid the United States Postal Service to set $3,300 worth of postage on the meter number. Regent House was billed $541.15 by the Hartes for their services. Regent House in turn charged its services and costs for the postage and the Hartes’ mailing service to Reed Enterprises, Inc., which paid the bill on January 19, 1971, with a check signed by petitioner Hamling.
Those individuals responding to the brochure would be sent copies of the Illustrated Report, which would be mailed with postage affixed by a second Pitney-Bowes meter number which was installed at Library Service, Inc., at the direction of an employee of Pitney-Bowes. The rental agreement for this meter was signed for Library Service by petitioner David Thomas, whom that employee identified as the person with whom he had dealt on the matter.
The evidence indicated that the individual petitioners were officers in the corporate petitioners, and also indicated that they were involved with selling the Illustrated Report, which entailed mailing out the advertising brochure. Petitioner Hamling, as president of Reed Enterprises, Inc., signed the check on the corporation’s behalf in payment to Regent House for the mailing of the advertisement. Petitioner Kemp was the editor of the Illustrated Report, and was vice president of Library Service, Inc., and Greenleaf Classics, Inc., which is the publisher of the Illustrated Report. He signed the application on behalf of Library Service, Inc., for the post office box in San Diego, which was the same post office box on the return envelope sent with the advertisement and on the advertisement itself. Petitioner Thomas signed the rental agreement for the postage meter which was used in affixing postage for sending copies of the Illustrated Report, and which Thomas directed to be installed at Library Service.
Petitioner Wright was the secretary of Reed Enterprises, Inc., and Greenleaf Classics, Inc. Wright assisted the postal superintendent in obtaining Kemp’s signature on the application for the post office box in San Diego. Wright also received a memorandum from London Press, Inc., the printer of the Illustrated Report, addressed to her as representative of Reed Enterprises, Inc., confirming the shipment of 28,537 copies of the Illustrated Report. Various other corporate documents tended to show the individual petitioners’ involvement with the corporate petitioners. Both the Government and the petitioners introduced testimony from various expert witnesses concerning the obscenity vel non of both the Illustrated Report and the brochure.
In affirming the convictions of these petitioners for the distribution of the obscene brochure, the Court of Appeals rejected various contentions made by the petitioners. The Court of Appeals also rejected petitioners’ petition for rehearing and suggestion for rehearing en banc. We granted certiorari, 414 U. S. 1143 (1974), and now affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.
I
These petitioners were convicted by a jury on December 23, 1971. App. 9. The Court of Appeals affirmed their convictions in an opinion filed on June 7, 1973. The Court of Appeals originally denied rehearing and suggestion for rehearing en banc on July 9, 1973. That order was withdrawn by the Court of Appeals to be reconsidered in fight of this Court’s decisions, announced June 21, 1973, in Miller v. California, 413 U. S. 15, and related cases, and was submitted to the en banc court, by order dated August 20, 1973. On August 22, 1973, the Court of Appeals entered an order denying the petition for rehearing and the suggestion for rehearing en banc.
“ ‘[W]e see no possible reason to remand, especially as the Supreme Court has just addressed itself to the construction and adequacy of the federal statute involved. See United States v. 12 200-Ft. Reels of Super 8mm. Film, supra, 41 U. S. L. W. at 4963, n. 7.’ ”
The principal question presented by this case is what rules of law shall govern obscenity convictions that occurred prior to the date on which this Court's decision in Miller v. California, supra, and its companion cases were handed down, but which had not at that point become final. Petitioners mount a series of challenges to their convictions based upon the so-called Memoirs test for the proscription of obscenity. (Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383 U. S. 413 (1966).) They also attack the judgments as failing to comply with the standards enunciated in the Miller cases, and conclude by challenging other procedural and evidentiary rulings of the District Court.
Questions as to the constitutionality of 18 IT. S. C. § 1461, the primary statute under which petitioners were convicted, were not strangers to this Court prior to the Miller decision. In Roth v. United States, 354 U. S. 476 (1957), the Court held that this statute did not offend the free speech, and free press guarantees of the First Amendment, and that it did not deny the due process guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment because it was “too vague to support conviction for crime.” Id., at 480. That holding was reaffirmed in United States v. Reidel, 402 U. S. 351 (1971). See also Manual Enterprises, Inc. v. Day, 370 U. S. 478 (1962); Ginzburg v. United States, 383 U. S. 463 (1966). Prior to Miller, therefore, this Court had held that 18 U. S. C. § 1461, “applied according to the proper standard for judging obscenity, do[es] not offend constitutional safeguards against convictions based upon protected material, or fail to give men in acting adequate notice of what is prohibited.” Roth v. United States, supra, at 492.
These petitioners were tried and convicted under the definition of obscenity originally announced by the Court in Roth v. United States, supra, and significantly refined by the plurality opinion in Memoirs v. Massachusetts, supra. The Memoirs plurality held that under the Roth definition
“as elaborated in subsequent cases, three elements must coalesce: it must be established that (a) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters; and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value.” Id., at 418.
Petitioners make no contention that the instructions given by the District Court in this case were inconsistent with the test of the Memoirs plurality. They argue instead that the obscenity vel non of the brochure has not been established under the Memoirs test. The Court of Appeals ruled against petitioners on this score, concluding that the jury’s finding that the brochure was obscene under the Memoirs plurality test was correct. Petitioners argue at length that their expert witnesses established that the brochure did not appeal to a prurient interest in sex, that it was not patently offensive, and that it had social value. Examining the record below, we find that the jury could constitutionally find the brochure obscene under the Memoirs test. Expert testimony is not necessary to enable the jury to judge the obscenity of material which, as here, has been placed into evidence. See Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, 413 U. S. 49, 56 (1973); Kaplan v. California, 413 U. S. 115, 120-121 (1973); Ginzburg v. United States, supra, at 465. In this case, both the Government and the petitioners introduced testimony through expert witnesses concerning the alleged obscenity of the brochure. The jury was not bound to accept the opinion of any expert in weighing the evidence of obscenity, and we conclude that its determination that the brochure was obscene was supported by the evidence and consistent with the Memoirs formulation of obscenity.
Petitioners nevertheless contend that since the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the counts charging the obscenity vel non of the Illustrated Report itself, that report must be presumed to be nonobscene, and therefore protected by the First Amendment. From this premise they contend that since the brochure fairly advertised the Illustrated Report, the brochure must also be nonobscene. The Court of Appeals rejected this contention, noting that “[t]he premise is false. The jury made no finding on the charged obscenity of the Report.” 481 F. 2d, at 315. The jury in this case did not acquit the petitioners of the charges relating to the distribution of the allegedly obscene Illustrated Report. It instead was unable to reach a verdict on the counts charging the distribution of the Illustrated Report, and accordingly, the District Court declared a mistrial as to those counts. App. 9-10. It has, of course, long been the rule that consistency in verdicts or judgments of conviction is not required. United States v. Dotterweich, 320 U. S. 277, 279 (1943); Dunn v. United States, 284 U. S. 390, 393 (1932). “The mere fact juries may reach different conclusions as to the same material does not mean that constitutional rights are abridged. As this Court observed in Roth v. United States, 354 U. S., at 492 n. 30, 'it is common experience that different juries may reach different results under any criminal statute. That is one of the consequences we accept under our jury system. Cf. Dunlop v. United States, 165 U. S. 486, 499-500.’ ” Miller v. California, 413 U. S., at 26 n. 9. The brochure in this case stands by itself, and must accordingly be judged. It is not, as petitioners suggest, inseparable from the Illustrated Report, and it cannot be seriously contended that an obscene advertisement could not be prepared for some type of nonobscene material. If consistency in jury verdicts as to the obscenity vel non of identical materials is not constitutionally required, Miller v. California, supra, the same is true a fortiori of verdicts as to separate materials, regardless of their similarities.
Our Miller decisions dealing with the constitutional aspects of obscenity prosecutions were announced after the petitioners had been found guilty by a jury, and their judgment of conviction affirmed by a panel of the Court of Appeals. Our prior decisions establish a general rule that a change in the law occurring after a relevant event in a case will be given effect while the case is on direct review. United States v. Schooner Peggy, 1 Cranch 103 (1801); Linkletter v. Walker, 381 U. S. 618, 627 (1965); Bradley v. School Board of Richmond, 416 U. S. 696, 711 (1974). Since the judgment in this case has not become final, we examine the judgment against petitioners in the light of the principles laid down in the Miller cases. While the language of 18 U. S. C. § 1461 has remained the same throughout this litigation, the statute defines an offense in terms of “obscenity,” and this Court's decisions, at least since Roth v. United States, supra, indicate that there are constitutional limitations which must be borne in mind in defining that statutory term. Thus any constitutional principle enunciated in Miller which would serve to benefit petitioners must be applied in their case.
Recognizing that the Memoirs plurality test had represented a sharp break with the test of obscenity as announced in Roth v. United States, supra, our decision in Miller v. California reformulated the test for the determination of obscenity vel non:
“The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest . . . ; (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” 413 U. S., at 24.
The Court of Appeals held on rehearing that the Miller cases generally prescribed a more relaxed standard of review under the Federal Constitution for obscenity convictions, and that therefore petitioners could derive no benefit from the principles enunciated in those cases. See n. 7, supra. Petitioners concede that this observation may be true in many particulars, but that in at least two it is not. They contend that the Miller treatment of the concept of “national standards” necessarily invalidates the District Court’s charge to the jury in their case relating to the standard by which the question of obscenity was to be judged, and they further contend that the general language of 18 U. S. C. § 1461 is, in the light of the holding in the Miller cases, unconstitutionally vague.
A
The trial court instructed the jury that it was to judge the obscenity vel non of the brochure by reference to “what is reasonably accepted according to the contemporary standards of the community as a whole.. .. Contemporary community standards means the standards generally held throughout this country concerning sex and matters pertaining to sex. This phrase means, as it has been aptly stated, the average conscience of the time, and the present critical point in the compromise between candor and shame, at which the community may have arrived here and now.” App. 241. Petitioners describe this as an instruction embodying the principle of “national standards” which, although it may have been proper under the law as it existed when they were tried, cannot be sustained under the law as laid down in Miller, where the Court stated:
“Nothing in the First Amendment requires that a jury must consider hypothetical and unascertainable ‘national standards’ when attempting to determine whether certain materials are obscene as a matter of fact.” 413 U. S., at 31-32.
Paradoxically, however, petitioners also contend that in order to avoid serious constitutional questions the standards in federal obscenity prosecutions must be national ones, relying on Manual Enterprises, Inc. v. Day, 370 U. S., at 488 (opinion of Harlan, J.), and United States v. Palladino, 490 F. 2d 499 (CA1 1974). Petitioners assert that our decisions in the two federal obscenity cases decided with Miller indicate that this Court has not definitively decided whether the Constitution requires the use of nationwide standards in federal obscenity prosecutions.
We think that both of these contentions evidence a misunderstanding of our Miller holdings. Miller rejected the view that the First and Fourteenth Amendments require that the proscription of obscenity be based on uniform nationwide standards of what is obscene, describing such standards as “hypothetical and unaseertainable,” 413 U. S., at 31. But in so doing the Court did not require as a constitutional matter the substitution of some smaller geographical area into the same sort of formula; the test was stated in terms of the understanding of “the average person, applying contemporary community standards.” Id., at 24. When this approach is coupled with the reaffirmation in Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, 413 U. S., at 56, of the rule that the prosecution need not as a matter of constitutional law produce “expert” witnesses to testify as to the obscenity of the materials, the import of the quoted language from Miller becomes clear. A juror is entitled to draw on his own knowledge of the views of the average person in the community or vicinage from which he comes for making the required determination, just as he is entitled to draw on his knowledge of the propensities of a “reasonable” person in other areas of the law. Stone v. New York, C. & St. L. R. Co., 344 U. S. 407, 409 (1953); Schulz v. Pennsylvania R. Co., 350 U. S. 523, 525-526 (1956). Our holding in Miller that California could constitutionally proscribe obscenity in terms of a “statewide” standard did not mean that any such precise geographic area is required as a matter of constitutional law.
Our analysis in Miller of the difficulty in formulating uniform national standards of obscenity, and our emphasis on the ability of the juror to ascertain the sense of the “average person, applying contemporary community standards” without the benefit of expert evidence, clearly indicates that 18 U. S. C. § 1461 is not to be interpreted as requiring proof of the uniform national standards which were criticized in Miller. In United States v. 12 200-ft. Reels of Film, 413 U. S. 123 (1973), a federal obscenity case decided with Miller, we said:
“We have today arrived at standards for testing the constitutionality of state legislation regulating obscenity. See Miller v. California, ante, at 23-25. These standards are applicable to federal legislation.” Id., at 129-130.
Included in the pages referred to in Miller is the standard of “the average person, applying contemporary community standards.” In view of our holding in 12 200-ft. Reels of Film, we hold that 18 U. S. C. § 1461 incorporates this test in defining obscenity.
The result of the Miller cases, therefore, as a matter of constitutional law and federal statutory construction, is to permit a juror sitting in obscenity cases to draw on knowledge of the community or vicinage from which he comes in deciding what conclusion “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would reach in a given case. Since this case was tried in the Southern District of California, and presumably jurors from throughout that judicial district were available to serve on the panel which tried petitioners, it would be the standards of that “community” upon which the jurors would draw. But this is not to say that a district court would not be at liberty to admit evidence of standards existing in some place outside of this particular district, if it felt such evidence would assist the jurors in the resolution of the issues which they were to decide.
Our Brother Brennan suggests in dissent that in holding that a federal obscenity case may be tried on local community standards, we do violence both to congressional prerogative and to the Constitution. Both of these arguments are foreclosed by our decision last Term in United States v. 12 200-ft. Reels of Film, supra, that the Miller standards, including the “contemporary community standards” formulation, applied to federal legislation. The fact that distributors of allegedly obscene materials may be subjected to varying community standards in the various federal judicial districts into which they transmit the materials does not render a federal statute unconstitutional because of the failure of application of uniform national standards of obscenity. Those same distributors may be subjected to such varying degrees of criminal liability in prosecutions by the States for violations of state obscenity statutes; we see no constitutional impediment to a similar rule for federal prosecutions. In Miller v. California, 413 U. S., at 32, we cited with approval Mr. Chief Justice Warren’s statement:
“[WJhen the Court said in Roth that obscenity is to be defined by reference to 'community standards,’ it meant community standards — not a national standard, as is sometimes argued. I believe that there is no provable 'national standard,’ and perhaps there should be none. At all events, this Court has not been able to enunciate one, and it would be unreasonable to expect locál courts to divine one. It is said that such a ‘community’ approach may well result in material being proscribed as obscene in one community but not in another, and, in all probability, that is true. But communities throughout the Nation are in fact diverse, and it must be remembered that, in cases such as this one, the Court is confronted with the task of reconciling conflicting rights of the diverse communities within our society and of individuals.” Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U. S. 184, 200-201 (1964) (dissenting opinion).
Judging the instruction given by the District Court in this case by these principles, there is no doubt that its occasional references to the community standards of the “nation as a whole” delineated a wider geographical area than would be warranted by Miller, 12 200-ft. Reels of Film, and our construction of § 1461 herein, swpra, at 105. Whether petitioners were materially prejudiced by those references is a different question. Certainly the giving of such an instruction does not render their convictions void as a matter of constitutional law. This Court has emphasized on more than one occasion that a principal concern in requiring that a judgment be made on the basis of “contemporary community standards” is to assure that the material is judged neither on the basis of each juror’s personal opinion, nor by its effect on a particularly sensitive or insensitive person or group. Miller v. California, supra, at 33; Mishkin v. New York, 383 U. S. 502, 508-509 (1966); Roth v. United States, 354 U. S., at 489. The District Court’s instruction in this case, including its reference to the standards of the “nation as a whole,” undoubtedly accomplished this purpose.
We have frequently held that jury instructions are to be judged as a whole, rather than by picking isolated phrases from them. Boyd v. United States, 271 U. S. 104, 107 (1926). In the unusual posture of this case, in which petitioners agree that the challenged instruction was proper at the time it was given by the District Court, but now seek to claim the benefit of a change in the law which casts doubt on the correctness of portions of it, we hold that reversal is required only where there is a probability that the excision of the references to the “nation as a whole” in the instruction dealing with community standards would have materially affected the deliberations of the jury. Cf. Namet v. United States, 373 U. S. 179, 190-191 (1963); Lopez v. United States, 373 U. S. 427, 436 (1963). Our examination of the record convinces us that such a probability does not exist in this case.
Our Brother Brennan takes us to task for reaching this conclusion, insisting that the District Court's instructions and its exclusion of the testimony of a witness, Miss Carl-sen, who had assertedly conducted a survey of standards in the San Diego area require that petitioners be accorded a new trial. As we have noted, infra, at 124-125, the District Court has wide discretion in its determination to admit and exclude evidence, and this is particularly true in the case of expert testimony. Stillwell Mfg. Co. v. Phelps, 130 U. S. 520, 527 (1889); Barnes v. Smith, 305 F. 2d 226, 232 (CA10 1962); 2 J. Wigmore, Evidence § 561 (3d ed. 1940). But even assuming that the District Court may have erred in excluding the witness’ testimony in light of the Miller cases, we think arguments made by petitioners’ counsel urging the admission of the survey re-emphasize the confusing and often gossamer distinctions between “national” standards and other types of standards. Petitioners’ counsel, in urging the District Court to admit the survey, stated:
“We have already had experts who have testified and expect to bring in others who have testified both for the prosecution and the defense that the material that they found was similar in all cities....” Tr. 3931.
“This witness can testify about experiences she had in one particular city. Whether this is or not a typical city is for the jury to decide.” Id,., at 3932.
“Now this supports the national survey. It is not something that stands alone. The findings here are consistent with the national survey and as part of the overall picture, taking into account, of course, that this is something that has taken place after the national survey, which was about two years ago, that Dr. Abelson performed.” Id., at 3934-3935.
The District Court permitted Dr. Wilson, one of the four expert witnesses who testified on behalf of petitioners, to testify as to materials he found available in San Diego, as a result of having spent several days there. Id., at 3575. He was then asked by petitioners’ counsel whether this material was “similar to or different than” the material found in other cities where he had also visited adult bookstores. The witness responded that he thought “essentially the same kinds of material are found throughout the United States.” Id., at 3577. These statements, in colloquies between counsel and Dr. Wilson, only serve to confirm our conclusion that while there may have been an error in the District Court's references to the “community standards of the nation as a whole” in its instructions, and in its stated reasons for excluding the testimony of Miss Carlsen, these errors do not require reversal under the standard previously enunciated.
B
Petitioners next argue that prior to our decision in Miller, 18 U. S. C. § 1461 did not contain in its language, nor had it been construed to apply to, the specific types of sexual conduct referred to in Miller, and therefore the section was unconstitutionally vague as applied to them in the prosecution of these cases. Such an argument, however, not only neglects this Court's decisions prior to Miller rejecting vagueness challenges to the federal statute, but also fundamentally misconceives the thrust of our decision in the Miller cases.
In Roth v. United States, 354 U. S., at 491, we upheld the constitutionality of 18 U. S. C. § 1461 against a contention that it did “not provide reasonably ascertainable standards of guilt and therefore violate [s] the constitutional requirements of due process.” In noting that the federal obscenity statute made punishable the mailing of material that is “obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy . . . [and of] other publication [s] of an indecent character,” the Court stated in Roth:
“Many decisions have recognized that these terms of obscenity statutes are not precise. This Court, however, has consistently held that lack of precision is not itself offensive to the requirements of due process. ‘. . . [T]he Constitution does not require impossible standards'; all that is required is that the language 'conveys sufficiently definite warning as to the proscribed conduct when measured by common understanding and practices. . . .’ United States v. Petrillo, 332 U. S. 1, 7-8. These words, applied according to the proper standard for judging obscenity, already discussed, give adequate warning of the conduct proscribed and mark ‘. . . boundaries sufficiently distinct for judges and juries fairly to administer the law .... That there may be marginal cases in which it is difficult to determine the side of the line on which a particular fact situation falls is no sufficient reason to hold the language too ambiguous to define a criminal offense. . . .’ Id., at 7.” 354 U. S., at 491-492 (footnote omitted).
Other decisions dealing with the pre-Miller constitutionality or interpretation of 18 U. S. C. § 1461 in other contexts have not retreated from the language of Roth. See, e. g., United States v. Reidel, 402 U. S. 351 (1971); Ginzburg v. United States, 383 U. S. 463 (1966); Manual Enterprises, Inc. v. Day, 370 U. S. 478 (1962). And as made clear by the opinion of Mr. Justice Harlan in Manual Enterprises, the language of 18 TJ. S. C. § 1461 had been, prior to the date of our decision in Miller, authoritatively construed in a manner cohsistent with Miller:
“The words of section 1461, 'obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile/ connote something that is portrayed in a manner so offensive as to make it unacceptable under current community mores. While in common usage the words have different shades of meaning, the statute since its inception has always been taken as aimed at obnoxiously debasing portrayals of sex. Although the statute condemns such material irrespective of the effect it may have upon those into whose hands it falls, the early case of United States v. Bennett, 24 Fed. Cas. 1093 (No. 14571), put

Question: What treatment did the court whose decision the Supreme Court reviewed accorded the decision of the court it reviewed?
A. stay, petition, or motion granted
B. affirmed
C. reversed
D. reversed and remanded
E. vacated and remanded
F. affirmed and reversed (or vacated) in part
G. affirmed and reversed (or vacated) in part and remanded
H. vacated
I. petition denied or appeal dismissed
J. modify
K. remand
L. unusual disposition
Answer: