Al Bendich, a lawyer who successfully defended the right to free speech in two landmark midcentury obscenity cases — involving Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” and Lenny Bruce’s nightclub act — died on Jan. 5 in Oakland, Calif. He was 85.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, his wife, Pamela Bendich, said.

Mr. Bendich was the last living member of the defense team in the “Howl” case, in which the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had published and sold “Howl” in book form, stood trial in San Francisco in 1957.

He was the sole defense lawyer in the first of Bruce’s obscenity trials, in San Francisco in 1962. Of the four obscenity trials Bruce would go through, the San Francisco case was the only one to end in an acquittal.

“Al’s work set a standard for freedom of artistic expression,” the civil rights lawyer Michael E. Tigar said in a recent interview. “Can you imagine a world in which it could be a crime to say words that you can hear on cable TV every night? That’s the world of the Sixties, in which there were legal prohibitions of the work of Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg and comedians such as Lenny Bruce. So this was pathbreaking.”