In this episode, Siobhan talks with Samantha Barbas about her book The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst: Free Speech Renegade (UCP, 2021). Barbas is Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo School of Law. She researches and teaches in the areas of legal history, First Amendment law, and mass communications law. Her work focuses on the intersection of law, culture, media and technology in United States history. Her recent research has explored the history of censorship, privacy and defamation.
In the 1930s and ’40s, Morris Ernst was one of America’s best-known liberal lawyers. The ACLU’s general counsel for decades, Ernst was renowned for his audacious fights against artistic censorship. He successfully defended Ulysses against obscenity charges, litigated groundbreaking reproductive rights cases, and supported the widespread expansion of protections for sexual expression, union organizing, and public speech. Yet Ernst was also a man of stark contradictions, waging a personal battle against Communism, defending an autocrat, and aligning 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 his later idiosyncratic zealotry. As she shows, today’s challenges to free speech and the exercise of political power make Morris Ernst’s battles as pertinent as ever
EPISODE 32: Kate Masur
EPISODE 31: Felicity Turner
EPISODE 30: Peter Grajzl & Peter Murrell
EPISODE 29: Jonathan Gienapp
EPISODE 28: Warren Milteer, Jr.
EPISODE 26: Samuel Fury Childs Daly
EPISODE 25: Nurfadzilah Yahaya
EPISODE 24: Joseph David
EPISODE 23: Charles Zelden
EPISODE 22: Philip Thai
EPISODE 21: Ariela Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente
EPISODE 20: Paul Finkelman
EPISODE 19: Robert Chase
EPISODE 18: Maddalena Marinari
EPISODE 17: Sophie White
EPISODE 16: Gregory Downs
EPISODE 15: Jane Hong
EPISODE 14: Kimberly Welch
EPISODE 13: William Hustwit
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