United States v. One Book Called Ulysses

In deciding it was not, District Court Judge John Munro Woolsey opened the door to importation and publication of serious works of literature that used coarse language or involved sexual subjects.

Copies were mailed to potential subscribers; a girl of unknown age read it and was shocked, and a complaint was made to the Manhattan District Attorney.

It therefore made an arrangement to import the edition published in France and to have a copy seized by the U.S. Customs Service when the ship carrying the work arrived.

[3] Although Customs had been told in advance of the anticipated arrival of the book, it was not confiscated when the ship docked, but instead was forwarded to Random House in New York City.

As in those cases, The United States, acting as libelant,[6] brought an action in rem against the book "Ulysses", rather than the author or importer, a procedure in the law that Morris Ernst, attorney for the publisher, had previously asked to have inserted when the statute was passed by Congress.

[8] Attorney Ernst later recalled the libelant's argument as having three lines of attack: (1) the work contained sexual titillation, especially Molly Bloom's soliloquy, and had "unparlorlike" language; (2) it was blasphemous, particularly in its treatment of the Roman Catholic Church; and (3) it brought to the surface coarse thoughts and desires that usually were repressed.

Acknowledging the "astonishing success" of Joyce's use of the stream of consciousness technique, the judge stated that the novel was serious and that its author was sincere and honest in showing how the minds of his characters operate and what they were thinking.

[11] Having disposed of the question of whether the book was written with pornographic intent, Woolsey turned to the issue of whether the work nevertheless was objectively obscene within the meaning of the law.

That meaning, as set forth in a string of cases cited in the opinion, was whether the work "tend[ed] to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts".

[15] Richard Ellmann, Joyce's biographer, wrote that Woolsey's eloquent and emphatic decision allowed the author to achieve his ambition of obtaining a "famous verdict".

A three-judge panel of the court heard the appeal and affirmed Woolsey's ruling by a two-to-one vote in United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce (Random House, Inc., Claimant), [19] The panel majority consisted of Judges Learned Hand and Augustus N. Hand, with Chief Judge Martin Manton dissenting.

[22] He acknowledged the critical acclaim given to the book, and found Joyce's depiction of his characters "sincere, truthful, relevant to the subject, and executed with real art".

[25] The majority opinion forthrightly confronted and disagreed with precedents which allowed courts to decide the question of obscenity on the basis of isolated passages.

[26] Such a standard would "exclude much of the great works of literature" and be impracticable, and the court therefore held that the "proper test of whether a given book is obscene is its dominant effect".

[26] Judge Hand concluded the majority opinion with a historical perspective of the harms of overzealous censorship: Art certainly cannot advance under compulsion to traditional forms, and nothing in such a field is more stifling to progress than limitation of the right to experiment with a new technique.

[28] He nevertheless went on to distinguish Ulysses from medical and scientific texts which are "of obvious benefit to the community", as the novel was but a work of fiction, "written for the alleged amusement of the reader only".