Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade
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1930s
1940s
A01=Samantha Barbas
aclu
Age Group_Uncategorized
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artistic censorship
audacious fights
Author_Samantha Barbas
automatic-update
biography
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BGH
Category=DNBH
Category=JPA
Category=LND
civil liberties lawyer
communism
constitutional law
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
free speech
freedom
general counsel
idealist
j edgar hoover
judge
Language_English
legal triumphs
liberal lawyers
new york
obscenity charges
PA=Available
personal freedoms
political history
Price_€20 to €50
privacy
PS=Active
reproductive rights cases
sex
sexual expression
softlaunch
union organizing
united states
Product details
- ISBN 9780226658049
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Jun 2021
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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In the 1930s and ’40s, Morris Ernst was one of the best-known liberal lawyers in the United States. An eminent attorney and general counsel of the ACLU for decades, Ernst was renowned for his audacious fights against literary and artistic censorship. He successfully defended Ulysses against obscenity charges, litigated groundbreaking reproductive rights cases, and supported the widespread broadening of protections for sexual expression, union organizing, and public speech. Yet this “human dynamo,” as friends called him, was also a man of stark contradictions, who also waged a personal battle against Communism, defended a foreign autocrat, and aligned himself with J. Edgar Hoover’s inflammatory crusades.
Arriving at a moment when issues of privacy, artistic freedom, and personal expression are freshly relevant, The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade brings this singularly complex figure into a timely new light. As Samantha Barbas’s eloquent and compelling biography makes ironically clear, Ernst both transformed free speech in America and inflicted damage to the cause of civil liberties. Drawing on Ernst’s voluminous cache of publications and papers, Barbas follows the life of this singular idealist from his pugnacious early career to his legal triumphs of the 1930s and ’40s and later-life turn toward zealous anticommunism. As she shows, today’s challenges to free speech and the exercise of political power make Morris Ernst’s battles as pertinent as ever.
Samantha Barbas is a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law and the author of five previous books, most recently Confidential Confidential: The Inside Story of Hollywood's Notorious Scandal Magazine.
