But Nesson forged ahead, more boldly still. A week after the First Circuit ruled “no” on the Webcast, there’s talk of an appeal to the Supreme Court on the issue. At the April team meeting I attend, Nesson proposes suing the judges on the panel, counting them as complicit in an abuse of legal process for their erroneous ruling. The office, filled with chairs and laptops, erupts. Four letter words fly. The volume rises. Ray Bilderbeck, the clinical’s notorious dissenter, puts his head back and laughs flat out. “They’re going to say ‘fuck you no were not going to re-hear,’” Meister says. “’Fuck you, fuck you. It’s not going to go well for you, fuck you.’”Suing the judges? Probably not the most effective way of winning them over to your side. (And Judge Selya would have used 14-letter words, not 4-letter ones.)
The notion of the fair use defense, when raised, also meets resistance.
“I don’t even know what you mean when you say ‘fairness,’” Bilderbeck insists, seated in a chair opposite Nesson’s desk and bristling at his professor’s apparent disregard for the four factors of the fair use canon. “I don’t know what ‘fair’ is…It seems like you want me to read your mind, and it’s not happening.”
“I want you to read the jury’s mind,” Nesson replies.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Crimson takes on Tenenbaum case; reveals Nesson's (aborted) plan to sue First Circuit judges for abuse of process
Christian Flow, a Harvard undergrad, has a very well-written and entertaining two-part piece in the Harvard Crimson's magazine about the Joel Tenenbaum saga and Professor Charles Nesson's efforts at "resistance in the face of repression." No major revelations for those of us who've been watching Tenenbaum's legal team at work, but plenty of great quotes and anecdotes about Nesson's antics. Flow even managed to infiltrate one of the team's strategy sessions, shortly after the First Circuit thwarted their effort to webcast district court proceedings to the world:
11 comments:
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"infiltrate", huh?
ReplyDeleteNot literally -- it's pretty clear from the context that Flow had permission to attend the team meeting.
ReplyDeleteWait . . . fair use isn't a jury issue.
ReplyDeleteChristian Flow is a great name for a boring rapper.
ReplyDeleteIf he sues the judges then he has more balls than brains.
ReplyDeleteGood luck getting passed the judicial immunity of a judge acting in his or her official capacity.
ReplyDeletec'mon now, we weren't really going to sue any judges. the point was to focus my students on the lengths to which the first circuit went to shut down the public's ability to see and hear our case that the RIAA's litigation campaign is an unconstitutional abuse and that what joel did was fair.
ReplyDeleteTaking product without paying for it is "fair."
ReplyDeleteUsing the law as it is written and the courts as they are intended to curtail this piracy is "unconstitutional."
Clearly there are better places to study law than Harvard.
If there was such a public demand to see and hear cases, then CourtTV wouldn't have dropped its gavel-to-gavel trial coverage many years ago due to abyssmal ratings and revenue. If a commercial entity can't succeed in covering the trials of a generation (OJ, Menendez, etc.), why would anyone bother investing in the free broadcast of the doldrums of everyday civil trial life?
ReplyDelete@ Anonymous 7:11:
ReplyDeleteYou're certainly right that the vast majority of cases aren't newsworthy enough to attract any coverage. But I don't see how that justifies banning cameras in those (relatively few) cases where a news organization *does* choose to cover the proceedings.
We may just share a basic philosophical difference on the matter, but I believe any case that arouses the interest of a news organization is exactly the kind of case that should have no broadcast coverage. Inside the courtroom there is a singular purpose, that of ascertaining the truth. The judges, the juries, the counsel, etc. are not there to to entertain watchers or to satisfy the cravings of the curious. When you introduce cameras into the courtroom, you convert it into a stage where performance takes precedence over justice. What we have seen time and again through televised coverage is that lawyers and judges make terrible actors. And when they start playing to their contingencies watching, everything else gets lost.
ReplyDelete