Why did the U.S. courts abandon the Hicklin standard?

U.S. courts moved away from the Hicklin standard because it focused on isolated passages rather than the work as a whole, which often led to the banning of significant literary works.

The shift began in 1934 when a New York circuit court of appeals rejected the Hicklin test while legalizing James Joyce's Ulysses. The court held that the proper legal standard for determining obscenity should be whether a publication, when considered in its entirety, has a "libidinous effect." This transition toward evaluating the "dominant theme" of a work as a whole was later solidified by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roth v. United States (1957), which established that obscenity must be judged by whether the dominant theme of the material appeals to prurient interest to the average person applying contemporary community standards.1