John Munro Woolsey

Background

For reasons of health his father, a civil engineer, had taken up cotton planting in the South, but the family's roots lay in the N.

Education

After attending private school in Englewood, N. J. , and Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachussets, John Woolsey entered Yale, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated in 1898.

In his college years he considered becoming a historian, but the prospect of joining the Manhattan law firm of a maternal uncle, Ebenezer Convers, proved more appealing.

degree in 1901, he was a founder (1901) and first secretary of the Columbia Law Review.

Career

At the Columbia Law School, from which he received the LL. B.

From 1922 to 1929 he was an associate editor of the Revue de Droit Maritime Comparé of Paris.

"From the time I began to study law I always wanted to be a Federal Judge, " he later recalled.

"In no other position is a man so well placed to see the pageant of American life pass before his eyes" (New York Times, Mar. 11, 1934).

In a case of November 1933 (Campbell v. Chase National Bank, 5 F. Supp.

156) he upheld the constitutionality of the anti-gold-hoarding provisions of the Emergency Banking Act of March 1933, an important piece of New Deal fiscal legislation.

Coming to the bench at the close of a decade of increasing permissiveness in sexual matters, Woolsey in several notable cases gave his judicial imprimatur to this trend.

He found the drift away from governmental censorship personally congenial, having acquired from William Graham Sumner [q. v. ] at Yale a belief in the virtue of unfettered competition in the realm of ideas as in the marketplace.

In July 1931 he reversed a federal ban on the importation of the works of Dr. Marie C. Stopes, the British birth control advocate, and on Dec. 6, 1933, in his most famous ruling, he similarly cleared the way for the free circulation of James Joyce's Ulysses, a novel which the government had for years stigmatized as obscene.

In a decision which has often been reprinted (United States v.

One Book Called "Ulysses, " 5 F. Supp.

The shocking words in Ulysses, he noted, "are old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe. "

In one of the epigrams for which he was noted, Woolsey added that in evaluating the prevalent sexuality in Ulysses "it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring. "

In appearance he was full-faced and bald, with prominent forehead and heavily lidded eyes.

They had one son, John Munro.

His age was sixty-eight.

II (1950); and Nat.

Cyc.

Am.

Biog. , Current Vol.

See also N. Y. Times, Dec. 4, 1943, p. 12, an editorial appraisal of his career upon his retirement; and S. J. Woolf, "A Judge Who Scans the Drama of Life, " N. Y. Times Mag. , Mar. 11, 1934, a personal profile with a pencil sketch by the author.

The Ulysses decision is reprinted in the Modern Lib.

edition of Ulysses (1934) and is discussed in: Ben Ray Redman, "Obscenity and Censorship, " Scribner's, May 1934; James C. N. Paul and Murray L. Schwartz, Federal Censorship: Obscenity in the Mails (1961); and Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print (1968).

Morris L. Ernst, The Best Is Yet (1945), the autobiography of the attorney who defended Ulysses before Judge Woolsey, contains interesting personal sidelights.

A collection of Woolsey's briefs, opinions, and other documents of his legal career is at Yale. ]

Religion

A Republican in politics and an Episcopalian in religion, Woolsey displayed in his private life the same cultivated sensibility which marked many of his judicial utterances.

Connections

He was admitted to the New York bar in 1901 and joined his uncle's firm, Convers & Kirlin (later Kirlin, Woolsey, Campbell, Hickox & Keating), with which he was associated for twenty-eight years.

Woolsey was married on Nov. 14, 1911, in Athol, Massachussets, to Alice Bradford Bacon, the daughter of a New London, Connecticut, clergyman.

Grandfather:

Woolsey

The American progenitor, George Woolsey, had come to New Amsterdam from England in the mid-seventeenth century; John Woolsey's grandfather was president of the Merchants' Exchange of New York City, and a great-uncle, Theodore Dwight Woolsey q.v., was president of Yale.

Daughter:

,

Woolsey, John Munro, (Jan. 3, 1877 - May 4, 1945), South Carolina 1877 1945 Male Jurist jurist, was born in Aiken, S. C., the oldest of four children (three sons and a daughter) of William Walton Woolsey and Katherine Buckingham (Convers) Woolsey.

children:

,

Woolsey, John Munro, (Jan. 3, 1877 - May 4, 1945), South Carolina 1877 1945 Male Jurist jurist, was born in Aiken, S. C., the oldest of four children (three sons and a daughter) of William Walton Woolsey and Katherine Buckingham (Convers) Woolsey.