A Love Affair With the Law

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A Love Affair with the Law, the autobiography of one of America's most distinguished lawyers, is Morris Ernst's moving personal story of his full, successful, and happy life. In many ways, it is a Horatio Alger story. The author was the son of a nonreading immigrant father from Pilsen, who started in this country as a pushcart peddler and progressed to become the owner of a small general store and a small loan agency for the farmers in the vicinity of Uniontown, Alabama.

The family moved to New York when Morris was a small child, making the typical hegira of the increasingly successful Jewish family from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to a Harlem brownstone, then to Morningside Park, and, finally, at the turn of the century, to Central Park West. Ernst went to Williams College and was admitted to the bar in 1913. Around the end of the next year, Lawrence Greenbaum, a classmate, asked Ernst to join him and his brother Edward, and Harbert A. Wolff, in a new law partnership - one that has endured with great distinction to this day.

Mr. Ernst's clients and his cases - among them the memorable defense of Ulysses - have been among the most famous in legal history. He has been a championship fighter against censorship, for a fairer postal rate for books, for arbitration of divorced parents on matters involving important decisions in their childrens' lives, and against birth control laws. He has strongly identified himself with most of the liberal causes of the twentieth century.

Although Morris Ernst has represented many big corporations, he is against the "bigness" of the law as it has evolved over the years. As corporations have become larger and larger, corporate law has become more specialized, with what he considers unhappy results for the legal profession. The inquiry between lawyer and client intrigues him more than do court contests - he enjoys discovering in what kind of world his client wants to live.