The Social Pressure Exerted on New York State Judges: The Cases of Muller and Knoedler v. the People

The aim of this article is to decipher how feelings of belonging to a social or status group, as well as the social pressure of a given era, are able to influence legislation, its application and the impartiality of judges. The nineteenth-century in the United States is a period particularly illustrative of this phenomenon, as will be shown by the examples of law Comstock of 1873, its application by Anthony Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and the divergent verdicts in the cases of People v. Muller (1884) and People v. Knoedler.