The Prestige of the Law

Abstract

This article examines Judge John Woolsey’s famous 1933 U.S. District Court decision declaring Ulysses not obscene, a ruling that legalized the novel’s importation into the U.S. and paved the way for Random House’s 1934 edition. “U.S. v. One Book Called ‘Ulysses’” was the third (and most important) in a trio of obscenity cases that Woolsey decided in the early 1930s, and in all three cases he heard arguments from ACLU lawyer Morris Ernst. A deeper understanding of Woolsey’s decision and its importance must restore its larger contexts, and this essay considers the decision’s unusual features—its sparse use of case history, its rhetorical flourishes, its outsize stature—through a detailed consideration of Judge Woolsey himself. Several unexamined documents (in archives and in private hands) help clarify our heretofore hazy picture of Woolsey, and a clearer image suggests that Woolsey’s decision relies not upon the standard authority of case law but upon what we might call prestige. What makes Judge Woolsey’s literary bent both compelling and “dangerous” (in the words of Judge Learned Hand) is that a decision like U.S. v. Ulysses highlights the resemblance between the prestige of literature and the authority of the law.