Morris Ernst
| Morris Ernst | |
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| Born | August 23, 1888 Uniontown, Alabama |
| Died | May 21, 1976 (aged 87) New York City |
| Nationality | Attorney |
| Alma mater | New York Law School |
| Known for | Co-founder of the ACLU |
Morris Leopold Ernst (August 23, 1888 – May 21, 1976) was an American lawyer and co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.
He was born in Uniontown, Alabama, on August 23, 1888, to a Czech-born father and German mother. His parents were Jewish. He lived in various locations around New York City from the age of 2. He attended the Horace Mann School and graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1909. He studied law at night at New York Law School where he graduated in 1912 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1913.
Ernst practiced law in New York City and in 1915 co-founded the law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst. In 1917, he helped found the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which later became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
From 1929 to 1959, he shared the title of general counsel at the ACLU with Arthur Garfield Hays. He became vice chairman of the ACLU's board in 1955.
In 1933, on behalf of Random House, he successfully defended James Joyce's novel Ulysses against obscenity charges, leading to its distribution in the U.S. Because he wrote the foreword to the book, he earned several hundred thousand dollars in royalties from its sales. He won similar cases on behalf of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Homecoming.
In 1937, as attorney for the American Newspaper Guild, he argued successfully in the Supreme Court that it should uphold the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) as applied to the press. The case established the right of media employees to organize labor unions.
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