said to be the most widely distributed judicial opinion in history. The opinion has been recognized as a perceptive analysis of Joyce's work. Richard Ellmann stated that Judge Woolsey's decision "said much more than it had to", and another Joyce biographer and critic, Harry Levin, called the decision a "distinguished critical essay". The opinion discusses some of the same characteristics that Joyce scholars have discerned in the work. Woolsey mentioned the "emetic" effect of some of the passages alleged to be obscene; Stuart Gilbert, Joyce's friend and author of an early critical study of the novel, stated that those passages "are, in fact, cathartic and calculated to allay rather than to excite the sexual instincts". And Harry Levin noted that the judge described the book's "effect in terms of catharsis, the purge of the emotion through pity and terror" that is ascribed to tragedy, a theme that Levin found in prior works of Joyce. The trial court judge had also stated that portrayal of the coarser inner thoughts of the characters was necessary to show how their minds operate, an authorial judgment that treats those characters not as mere fictional creations, but as authentic personalities. Gilbert said that the "personages of Ulysses are not fictitious", but that "these people are as they must be; they act, we see, according to some lex eterna, an ineluctable condition of their very existence". Through these characters Joyce "achieves a coherent and integral interpretation of life", or in the words of Judge Woolsey, a "true picture" of lower-middle class life, drawn by a "great artist in words" who had devised a "new literary method for the observation and description of mankind". References Bibliography Primary sources: court opinions Secondary sources: background and analysis "75 Years Since First Authorised American Ulysses!". Dublin: The James Joyce Center (2006). Archived page retrieved May 24, 2013. Birmingham, Kevin (2014). The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses. New York: Penguin Press. . Bowker, Gordon (2011), James Joyce: a new biography. New York: Faffar, Straus and Giroux. (first American edition, 2012). Hardiman, Adrian (2017). Joyce in Court. London: Head of Zeus Press. . Herbert, Stacy (Spring 2004). "A Draft for "Ulysses in Print: the Family Tree", an Installation for the Exhibition". Antwerp: Genetic Joyce Studies, Issue 4'''. Menand, Louis, "Silence, Exile, Punning: James Joyce's chance encounters". The New Yorker, July 2, 2012, pp. 71–75. Moscato, Michael and LeBlanc,