Morris Leopold Ernst (1888 – 1976) was an American lawyer and co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.

He was born in Uniontown, Alabama on Aug. 23, 1888, but 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 1909. He was admitted to the bar in 1913 after studying law at night.

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 would later become the American Civil Liberties Union.

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. He was compensated with royalties on the sales of the book, ultimately earning several hundred thousand dollars. 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 persuaded the Supreme Cort to uphold the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) as applied to the press, establishing the right of media employees to organize labor unions.

Ernst was a strong supporter of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. In 1940, as head of the ACLU, he agreed to bar communists from employment there and even discouraged their membership, basing his position on a distinction between the rights of the individual and the rights of groups.

He counted Justice Brandeis as a close friend and later had close personal relationships with Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and New York Governor Herbert Lehman.

Perhaps his most controversial case found him on the opposite side from his political allies. In 1956, Jesus de Galindez, a critic of the regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, disappeared, abducted from New York City, it was charged, by Trujillo's agents. Ernst defended the Trujillo regime citing the fundamental princcpal that every defendant has a right to counsel.

He kept a summer home on Nantucket and enjoyed sailing small boats. He died at home in New York City on May 21, 1976.

Morris Ernst's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Published Works (partial list)

• The Best is Yet (1945)
• So Far, So Good (1948)
• Touch Wood: A Year's Diary (1960)
• Untitled: The Diary of my 72nd Year (1962)
• A Love Affair with the Law

Notes

Sources

• New York Times: "Morris Ernst, 'Ulysses' Case Lawyer, Dies," May 23, 1976