Curtis Bok

Curtis Bok
Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice
In office 1958–1962

William Curtis Bok (September 7, 1897 - May 22, 1962) was a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice, philanthropist and writer. Heir to an enormous publishing fortune, he was also a devout Quaker and an avid sailor.

Born in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, he was the son of Edward W. Bok, editor-in-chief of the Ladies Home Journal, and Mary Louise Curtis, the only child and heir of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, founder of the Curtis Publishing Company. His father won the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for biography. His mother founded the Curtis Institute of Music.

He graduated from the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania (1915), and attended Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He left college to join the U.S. Navy during World War I, and returned to study law at the University of Virginia, graduating in 1921.

He worked on several public service projects before forming a law partnership with Robert Dechert and Owen B. Rhodes in 1930. He served as an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, 1929–32, and ran unsuccessfully for district attorney in 1935. Appointed an Orphans Court judge the following year, he became president judge of the Court of Common Pleas in 1937.

His most famous opinion was on obscenity in literature — Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Gordon et al., Court of Quarter Sessions, Philadelphia, June 1948. In March 1948, the Philadelphia Vice Squad raided 54 booksellers, confiscating works by authors such as Erskine Caldwell, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, and Calder Willingham. In an elegantly written opinion, Bok found that the books were "obvious efforts to show life as it is," and that Pennsylvania could not censor them:

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