The law criminalized not only sexually explicit material, but also material dealing with birth control and abortion. Although lower courts in the U.S. had used the Hicklin standard sporadically since 1868, it was not until 1879, when prominent federal judge Samuel Blatchford upheld the obscenity conviction of D. M. Bennett using Hicklin, that the constitutionality of the Comstock Law became firmly established. In 1896, the Supreme Court in Rosen v. United States, , adopted the Hicklin test as the appropriate test of obscenity. However, in 1933, the Hicklin test ended on the federal level when, in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, 72 F.2d 705 (2d Cir. 1933), Judge John Woolsey found Ulysses to not be obscene. Avoiding the Hicklin test, he said instead that in evaluating obscenity, a court must consider (1) the work as a whole, not just selected passages that could be interpreted out of context; (2) the effect on an average, rather than the most susceptible person; and (3) contemporary community standards. This ruling refuted those who argued against adult possession of material that could hypothetically corrupt a child. Finally, in 1957, the Supreme Court ruled in Roth v. United States, that the Hicklin test was inappropriate. In Roth, Justice Brennan, writing for the majority, noted that some American courts had adopted the Hicklin standard, but that later decisions more commonly relied upon the question of "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest." This Roth test became essentially the new definition of obscenity in the United States. References Further reading Obscenity law Legal tests