Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Legal Exhibitionist: Morris Ernst, Jewish Identity, and the Modern Celebrity Lawyer

Legal Exhibitionist: Morris Ernst, Jewish Identity, and the Modern Celebrity Lawyer

Silverman, Joel

Hardcover

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Law, Culture, and the Humanities

Biographies GeneralGeneral World History

ISBN10: 1683933354
ISBN13: 9781683933359
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: Apr 27 2022
Pages: 216
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.

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