The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade PDF Download

Author: Samantha Barbas
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022665804X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 427

View

Book Description
"Samantha Barbas delineates the life of famed lawyer and political advisor Morris Ernst, an early shaper of the American Civil Liberties Union. Today's fundamental challenges to free speech, expressive rights, and the exercise of political power make Ernst's battles to establish the cultural and legal norms of the twentieth century freshly interesting-particularly his role in framing the right to privacy. Barbas details Ernst's legendary free speech cases but also his manipulative ways and idiosyncratic and troubling political associations. A vital and conflicted man, Ernst was shaped strongly by the intersection of his legal ideas and the driving politics of his time"--

Author: Samantha Barbas
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022665818X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 427

View

Book Description
A long-overdue biography of the legendary civil liberties lawyer—a vital and contrary figure who both defended Ulysses and fawned over J. Edgar Hoover. 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.

Author: Samantha Barbas
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 0912777567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

View

Book Description
In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including sexual affairs, drug use, and sexual orientation, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the bestselling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Eventually the stars fought back, filing multimillion-dollar libel suits against the magazine. The state of California, prodded by the film studios, prosecuted Harrison for obscenity and criminal libel, culminating in a famous, star-studded Los Angeles trial. This is Confidential's story, detailing how the magazine revolutionized celebrity culture and American society in the 1950s and beyond. With its bold red-yellow-and-blue covers, screaming headlines, and tawdry stories, Confidential exploded the candy-coated image of movie stars that Hollywood and the press had sold to the public. It transformed Americas from innocents to more sophisticated, worldly people, wise to the phony and constructed nature of celebrity. It shifted reporting on celebrities from an enterprise of concealment and make-believe to one that was more frank, bawdy, and true. Confidential's success marked the end of an era of hush-hush—of secrets, closets, and sexual taboos—and the beginning of our age of tell-all exposure.

Author: Joel Silverman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683933362
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 217

View

Book Description
Born to a Jewish immigrant shopkeeper in a small Alabama town, Morris Ernst used aggressive self-promotion and exaggeration—what he called “exhibitionism”—to transcend his insecurities and his part-time legal training to become one of America’s most famous lawyers. During the first half of the twentieth century, Ernst championed free speech, sexual education, birth control, and reproductive health, and his landmark defense of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1933 cemented Ernst’s reputation as the top progressive attorney of the era. To promote himself, Ernst befriended newspaper writers, authors, actors, politicians, and practically anyone whose work carried some weight in popular culture. But his hunger for respect and recognition, together with his need for excitement, led Ernst to lavish praise on J. Edgar Hoover and to publicly defend—and profit from—a Dominican dictator. In the process, Ernst undermined his own credibility and largely fell out of favor with the public. By examining key moments of his life and career, The Legal Exhibitionist: Morris Ernst, Jewish Identity, and the Modern Celebrity Lawyer describes how Ernst’s exhibitionism led to his rise and fall and suggests how his strategy of exaggeration anticipated the emergence of today’s celebrity lawyers.

Author: Ralph Engelman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053567
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

View

Book Description
A Century of Repression offers an unprecedented and panoramic history of the use of the Espionage Act of 1917 as the most important yet least understood law threatening freedom of the press in modern American history. It details government use of the Act to control information about U.S. military and foreign policy during the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror. The Act has provided cover for the settling of political scores, illegal break-ins, and prosecutorial misconduct.

Author: Gregory A. Borchard
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1544391188
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 3333

View

Book Description
Journalism permeates our lives and shapes our thoughts in ways that we have long taken for granted. Whether it is National Public Radio in the morning or the lead story on the Today show, the morning newspaper headlines, up-to-the-minute Internet news, grocery store tabloids, Time magazine in our mailbox, or the nightly news on television, journalism pervades our lives. The Encyclopedia of Journalism covers all significant dimensions of journalism, such as print, broadcast, and Internet journalism; U.S. and international perspectives; and history, technology, legal issues and court cases, ownership, and economics. The encyclopedia will consist of approximately 500 signed entries from scholars, experts, and journalists, under the direction of lead editor Gregory Borchard of University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Author: Samuel Moyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674256522
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

View

Book Description
Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Author: David T. Beito
Publisher: Independent Institute
ISBN: 1598133586
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 459

View

Book Description
"This book is not mere history; it is an expose. You won’t know which is more shocking: the lengths to which FDR and New Dealers like Senators (and future Supreme Court justices) Hugo Black and Sherman Minton went to suppress freedom of speech, privacy, and civil rights; or the degree to which these efforts have been concealed by pro-FDR and New Deal propagandists." —Randy E. Barnett, Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center Spying on citizens. Censoring critics. Imprisoning minorities. These are the acts of communist dictators, not American presidents.... Or are they? Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy enjoys regular acclaim from historians, politicians, and educators. Lauded for his New Deal policies, leadership as a wartime president, cozy fireside chats, and groundbreaking support of the "forgotten man," FDR, we have been told, is worthy of the same praise as men like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.... But is that true? Does the father of today's welfare state really deserve such generous approbation? Or is there a dark side to this golden legacy? The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance unveils a portrait much different from the standard orthodoxy found in today's historical studies. Deploying an abundance of primary source evidence and well-reasoned arguments, historian and distinguished professor emeritus David T. Beito masterfully presents a complete account of the real Franklin D. Roosevelt: a man who abused power, violated human rights, targeted dissidents, and let his crude racism imprison American citizens merely for being of Japanese descent. Read it, and discover how FDR: shamelessly censored critics of his administration, barred them from the public square, destroyed their careers, and even bankrupted them when possible; locked up Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps built on American soil; sowed the seeds of today's out-of-control surveillance state; and much, much more... Here is an all too rare portrait of a man who changed the course of American history ... not for the better. Read it, and you'll never view the fireside president the same again.

Author: Beverly Gage
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593511468
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 897

View

Book Description
Now in paperback, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J Edgar Hoover deemed "Masterful…an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work”by The Washington Post (and everywhere else) "Revelatory...an acknowledgment of the complexities that made Hoover who he was, while charging the turbulent currents that eventually swept him aside."—The New York Times G-Man is the groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today’s conservative political landscape. Hoover transformed a scandal-riddled law-enforcement backwater, into a modern machine—one just as oppressive as it was promising. He rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of the state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history. Beverly Gage’s monumental work explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family to a strongarm for white supremacists and the politicized Christian right, serving eight presidents. G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history--not at the fringes, but at the center--and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century. “[A] crisply written, prodigiously researched, and frequently astonishing new biography”—The New Yorker “Gage’s penetrating account of Hoover’s career, especially his many long-eclipsed triumphs, offers a well-timed and sobering perspective as yet another institution in our fractured country struggles to maintain trust.” -The Atlantic “Gage’s triumph is her deft navigation through Hoover’s 'deep state,' while reminding us of the abuse of power that remains his enduring legacy.”—The Boston Globe

Author: Anup Malani
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625495X
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 365

View

Book Description
When the Supreme Court's majority ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the PPACA, or Obamacare), it was clear that this major shift in American health care provision was here to stay. For better or worse, the PPACA is now both a target for, and a constraint on, the next wave of reformist ideas. Driven by curiosity about how the American health care regime will continue to evolve in the near and medium term, Dean Michael Schill and Professor Anup Malani of the University of Chicago Law School commissioned fourteen essays from leading scholars of law, economics, medicine, and public health that offer predictions for the most important issues and debates in health-care reform over the next five to seven years. Essays are arranged in five sections. Part I, ACA and the Law, sets the stage with three essays on legal challenges and justifications for the Act. Part II, ACA and the Federal Budget, explores the variety of potential fiscal consequences resulting from Obamacare. Part III, ACA and Health Care Delivery, offers competing viewpoints on what the Act will ultimately mean for consumers of health care. Part IV, Health Care Costs, Innovation, and the ACA speculates about what the altered financial structure of health care will mean for the pace of development of new medical technologies. Part V, ACA and Health Insurance Markets, concludes the volume with a pair of contrasting assessments of the prospects for the new insurance "exchange" markets.