Charles Nesson

Charles Nesson
Born	February 11, 1939 (1939-02-11) (age 70)
Spouse(s)	Fern Leicher Nesson
Children	Rebecca, Leila
Website http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/cnesson http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/nesson/blog/

"Nesson" redirects here. For the French poet, see Pierre de Nesson.

Charles Rothwell Nesson (born February 11, 1939) is the William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society^[1] and of the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society.^[2] He is author of Evidence, with Murray and Green, and has participated in several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including the landmark case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals.^[3] In 1971, Nesson defended Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case.^[1] He was co-counsel for the plaintiffs in the case against W. R. Grace and Company that was made into the book A Civil Action, which was, in turn, made into the film of the same name.^[4] Nesson's nickname in the book, Billion-Dollar Charlie, was given to him by Mark Phillips, who worked with him on the W.R. Grace case.^[5]

Early life and education

Nesson attended Harvard College as an undergraduate, studying mathematics. He took the law school boards junior year, earning a near perfect score, though was initially rejected early admission from Harvard Law School for his grades.^[5] After improving his grades, Nesson was accepted. Nesson surprised himself by achieving and retaining a ranking of first out of five hundred students.^[5] He became among only a handful of people in history to have graduated summa cum laude,^[2] and is rumored to have left the law school with the highest GPA since Felix Frankfurter graduated in 1907.^[5]

Nesson was a law clerk to Justice John Marshall Harlan II on the United States Supreme Court, 1965 term. He then worked as a special assistant in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division under John Doar.^[5] His first case, White v. Crook, made race and gender-based jury selection in Alabama unconstitutional. Nesson joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1966, and was tenured three years later.^[1] In 1997, he co-founded Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Nesson at an iCommons meeting in Dubrovnik 2007

Current activities

He is currently leading a project to "reify university as a meta player in cyberspace", to advance restorative justice in Jamaica, and to legitimize and teach poker and the value of strategic poker thinking.^[2] For the latter, he made an appearance on the The Colbert Report; when Colbert joked that Nesson may have a gambling problem, his response was, "My gambling problem is that poker gets lumped in with gambling."^[6]

In May 2008, he represented the founder of National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and publisher of High Times Magazine, who wished to challenge Massachusetts state marijuana possession laws.^[7] The defendants were found guilty. Nesson is appealing the verdict.^[8]

In 2006 he taught CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion with Rebecca Nesson and Gene Koo.^[9] He teaches courses in the law and practice of Evidence (how to prove the "truth"), Trials in Second Life where he is represented by his avatar "Eon"^[10], and a reading group with Fern Nesson^[11] on Freedom.^[2]

Nesson has recently filed a counter-claim against the RIAA which challenges the constitutionality of an attempt to fine Joel Tenenbaum over $1,000,000 for the alleged illegal sharing on seven songs from a file-sharing network.^[12]

Publications

Selected publications:^[13]

• Green, Nesson & Murray, Evidence (3rd ed. Aspen)
• Constitutional Hearsay: Requiring Foundational Testing and Corroboration under the Confrontation Clause, 81 Va. L. Rev. 149 (1995), with Yochai Benkler
• Incentives to Spoliate Evidence in Civil Litigation: The Need for Vigorous Judicial Action, 13 Cardozo L. Rev. 793 (1991)
• Agent Orange Meets the Blue Bus: Factfinding at the Frontier of Knowledge, 66 B.U.L. Rev. 521 (1986)
• The Evidence or the Event? On Judicial Proof and the Acceptability of Verdicts, 98 Harvard Law Review 1357 (1985)
• Reasonable Doubt and Permissive Inferences: The Value of Complexity, 92 Harvard Law Review 1187 (1979)

Personal life

Following his tenure at Harvard, Nesson married one of his students, now Fern Leicher Nesson, and bought a home in Cambridge near the Harvard campus. Nesson and his wife have two daughters, Rebecca and Leila, and four grandchildren, Nico and Charlie, Sasha and Max.^[5]

Links

• Charles Nesson's webpage at Harvard Law
• Profile at Harvard Law

References

External links

• Charles Nesson. (2006-05-12) (Real Video, Real Audio, MP3 audio). Beyond Broadcast Conference: Closing Remarks. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: WGBH Educational Foundation, Cambridge Community Television. http://forum-network.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3141. Retrieved on 2007-09-29.