High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Samuel Roth (1893 – July 3, 1974) was an American publisher and writer. He was the plaintiff in Roth v. United States (1957), which was a key Supreme Court ruling on freedom of sexual expression. The minority opinion, regarding redeeming social value as a criterion in obscenity prosecutions, became a template for the liberalizing First Amendment decisions of the 1960s.