[2] Bok worked on several public service projects before forming a law partnership with Robert Dechert and Owen B. Rhodes in 1930.

[3] His most famous opinion was on obscenity in literature — Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Gordon et al., Court of Quarter Sessions, Philadelphia, June 1948.

In March 1948, the Philadelphia vice squad raided 54 booksellers, confiscating works by authors such as Erskine Caldwell, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, and Calder Willingham.

I should prefer that my own three daughters meet the facts of life and the literature of the world in my library than behind a neighbor's barn, for I can face the adversary there directly.

[5] He was an officer of the Curtis Institute of Music, and founded the Philadelphia Forum, a cultural boosterism group that sponsored lectures, concerts and art exhibits.

A supporter of presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt's efforts to normalize relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, Bok made a two-month tour of Russia in 1932, then stayed on for three additional months, working in a factory and as a chauffeur.

On November 25, 1934, Bok married Nellie Lee Holt (1901–1984), the director of religious education at Stephens College for Women in Columbia, Missouri,[8] and a peace activist who had studied with Mahatma Gandhi.

He and his second wife altered a house in Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania, adding Art Deco interiors by Wharton Esherick (1935–1937).

Jerome J. Shestack, a friend and legal colleague, wrote of Bok: "His deep and abiding sympathy for the human condition was the hallmark both of his courtroom and of his life.