Edward de Grazia

Edward Richard de Grazia (February 5, 1927 – April 11, 2013) was an American lawyer, writer, and free speech activist.^[1]

De Grazia was born in Chicago.^[1] He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, before returning to the United States. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor's in 1948, and earned his J.D. degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1951.^[2] He practiced law in Washington, D.C., and then worked for a time with UNESCO in Paris (1956 to 1959).^[2] After teaching at a variety of Washington, D.C., area law schools, in 1976 he became a founding member of the faculty at Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, where he remained for the next three decades.^[2]

De Grazia was married three times, to Ellen O'Connor, Liz Goode, and Lora Price.^[1] He had several children, including Augustus de Grazia (died 2011),^[2] David de Grazia, Christophe de Grazia, Belinda de Grazia Holtzclaw, and Elizabeth de Grazia Blumenfeld.^[1]

De Grazia was involved in numerous high-profile cases of literary and artistic censorship in the 1960s, including several on behalf of the publisher Barney Rosset, who published works by Henry Miller and William Burroughs, among others.^[2] De Grazia was also involved in efforts to protect the speech rights of antiwar demonstrators, as described by Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night (1968).^[2] In 1991 he published Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius, a lengthy and authoritative history of the struggle against literary censorship.^[2]

Significant cases litigated[]

• Postal Service censorship of Lysistrata (1955)^[3]
• Grove Press v. Gerstein (1964), censorship of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934), decided with Jacobellis v. Ohio
• 1965 - censorship of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959)
• 1967 censorship of film I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967)
• Defense of Lenny Bruce

Bibliography[]

• Censorship Landmarks (1969)
• Banned Films (with Roger Newman) (1982)
• Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (1991)

References[]