Joel J. Tyler ^People

Born Josel Gonigman on July 28, 1921, in Bälti, Judge Tyler came to the United States with his family as an infant. His name was Americanized to Joseph Honigman.He attended Indiana University and finished his undergraduate education at New York University before graduating from law school at Fordham. His first job was in the law department of the Allied Chemical and Dye corporation. He opened his own practice ni 1951. Mayor John V. Lindsay named him licensing commissioner in 1966, a post he held until 1968. Afterward, he served on the Criminal Court of New York and was an acting State Supreme Court justice and then a federal magistrate until he retired in 1991. On March 1, 1973, Judge Tyler came down stridently against the film, though not without literary flourish. In an opinion that came with a long appen- dix, he called Deep Throat this feast of carrion and squalor, a nadir of decadenceand a Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire. Judge Tyler fined Mature Enterprises $100,000, which was later reduced onappeal.Shortly after Judge Tyler's ruling, the United States Supreme Court, in Miller v. California, redefined obscenity and made ti easier for states to regulate material that fit the definition. (The court said material was obscene if ti appealed to a prurient interest in sex, fi it described sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and if, as a whole, it lacked serious literary, artistic, scientific or political value).