Judging Woolsey Judging Obscenity: Elitism, Aestheticism, and the Reasonable Libido in the Ulysses Customs Case

This essay explores the legal and social challenges that federal Judge John Munro Woolsey faced in deciding the Ulysses Customs case in 1933. Woolsey’s decision and the opinion he wrote to explain it remain misunderstood today in the wake of recent critiques that have assailed him for purportedly making Ulysses into a monument of aesthetic autonomy and muting the work’s raw, salutary indecency. Woolsey’s judging was much more, however, than privileged power masquerading as urbane progressivism, indifferent to the popular will; instead, it was a flexible, creative response to social and legal realities that constrained judicial approaches to obscenity in the 1930s. This essay reexamines the procedural and substantive dimensions of the litigation, including the parties’ waiver of a jury trial, Woolsey’s controversial use of “literary assessors,” and his important rulings on prurient effect, the reasonable libido, serious literary value, and holistic context for testing obscenity. In essence, Woolsey has been faulted, unfairly, for not applying legal standards that did not exist until thirty years later, and his actual achievement in his own moment has been undervalued.