An obit from the Times:

Joel J. Tyler, who as a Manhattan judge ruled, in a particularly explicit and colorful opinion, that the pornographic film “Deep Throat” was obscene and that the New York City theaters showing it were breaking the law, inadvertently helping it become perhaps the most popular X-rated movie of all time, died in Yonkers on Nov. 9. He was 90. . .

Judge Tyler, a former city commissioner of licenses, had been on the Criminal Court bench for four years when “Deep Throat” opened at the New Mature World Theater on West 49th Street on June 12, 1972. The film, about a woman whose quest for sexual satisfaction is frustrated until she discovers that her clitoris is in her throat, almost immediately became a touchstone in the culture wars of the day.

On one side was outrage over the film’s flagrant and unashamed depiction of sex acts; on the other was cheering for its daring to confront social taboos and to present a woman’s sexual needs as being equally robust as a man’s.

A notorious artifact, “Deep Throat” became a target in the early efforts of New York City to rid Times Square of its seamier elements. In August that year, complaints were lodged by the Police Department and charges were filed against Mature Enterprises, the company that owned the theater, for promotion of obscene material. The trial began in December 1972.

A psychiatrist testified that the sexual acts depicted in the film were “well within the bounds of normal behavior.” A film critic testified that “Deep Throat” had redeeming social value — a key element in the definition of obscenity — because it showed sympathy for female desires, because the script contained humor and because, unlike other porn films, it was photographed “with clarity and lack of grain.”

On the other hand, a New York University professor, responding to a claim that the film was at least in part a spoof of sexual behavior, said, “I do not see how you can spoof fellatio by showing continuous performance of fellatio.”

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 appendix, he called “Deep Throat” “this feast of carrion and squalor,” “a nadir of decadence” and “a Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire.”

“Oh, yes! There is a gossamer of a story line — the heroine’s all-engrossing search for sexual gratification, and when all sexual endeavors fail to gratify, her unique problem is successfully diagnosed to exist in her throat,” he wrote, adding, “The alleged story lines are the facade, the sheer negligee through which clearly shines the producer’s and the defendant’s true and only purpose, that is, the presentation of unmistakably hard-core pornography.”

Judge Tyler fined Mature Enterprises $100,000, which was later reduced on appeal.

This ruling came before Miller v. California, in which the Court attempted to define obscenity.

Shortly after Judge Tyler’s ruling, the United States Supreme Court, in Miller v. California, redefined obscenity and made it easier for states to regulate material that fit the definition. (The court said material was obscene if it appealed to a prurient interest in sex; if it described sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and if, as a whole, it lacked serious literary, artistic, scientific or political value.)

“If I were to write that appendix today,” he told The New York Law Journal in 1991, “I would be deemed a fool, given the substantial change in our outlook.”