About Barbara
Barbara Morgenstern is a licensed Ohio attorney and taught media law and ethics and various news writing and reporting courses for 10 years at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.
She also served as co-director of Miami’s “Italy and the Renaissance,” six-week summer abroad program in Florence, Italy, having taught “Specialty Reporting in Journalism” there a previous summer.
Barbara received her juris doctorate from the University of Cincinnati College of Law and a B.A. in Journalism from Arizona State University.
Through her American Bar Association activities she organized an event at Miami University featuring Dr. Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, which resulted in a $100,000 gift to the journalism program. She also co-authored “Top Paper in the Law Division,” Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Southeast Colloquium, March 4, 2006: “Applying Hazelwood to the College Press: Forum Doctrine and Government Speech in the U.S. Court of Appeal.”
A long-time supporter of women in the law, Barbara served as a president of the Greater Cincinnati Women Lawyers Association and she is a founding member of the Ohio Women’s Bar Association. Nationally, Barbara served as the first chair of the Teaching Committee of the American Bar Association’s Forum on Communications Law.
Currently participating in the Volunteer Lawyers Project of the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati, Barbara is pictured here with Molly Russell, the Project’s Managing Attorney.
Before law school Barbara worked at two small newspapers in Arizona before becoming a reporter for The Cincinnati Post where she won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists, Queen City Chapter, for her coverage of multi-million dollar cable TV franchising battles. As a lawyer, for three years she wrote the Solo Network column on small firm practice for the American Bar Association Journal. Barbara also engaged in the general practice of law in the family’s Butler County, Ohio, firm, with her father, the late Carl Morgenstern, a 1948 Harvard Law School graduate.
A former law clerk to three federal judges in Cincinnati, she participated as of counsel with the late John A. Lloyd, Jr., in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Harte-Hanks Communications, Inc. v. Connaughton, a public figure libel case. The Morgenstern law firm, with co-counsel Ron Burdge, also established the law on attorney fees in Ohio as relates to the Consumer Sales Practices Act. In Bittner v. Tri-County Toyota, Inc. (1991), 58 Ohio St 3d 143, her advocacy persuaded the Ohio Supreme Court to adopt the federal lodestar computation, a big win for the little guy. Assisting her law firm colleague and father, Carl Morgenstern, take the depositions of four used car salesmen in the case remains a highlight of her legal career.
