Melville Nimmer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Melville Bernard Nimmer (1923-1985) was a American lawyer and law professor, renowned as an expert in freedom of speech and United States copyright law.
Nimmer graduated from UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Harvard Law School. He was professor at the UCLA School of Law from 1962. One year later, he published the two-volume treatise that would become the definitive text on copyright law, "Nimmer on Copyright." In 1984, he published a one-volume treatise on freedom of speech, titled appropriately "Nimmer on Freedom of Speech: Treatise on Theory of First Amendment."
As a lawyer, he was best known as the winning attorney in the 1971 case Cohen v. California. In Cohen, the Supreme Court of the United States, by a 5-4 vote in an opinion written by Justice Harlan, held that a state cannot criminalize speech absent a "particularized and compelling reason." The Court struck down the conviction of a 19-year-old man who had walked into the Los Angeles courthouse with a shirt reading "Fuck the Draft." Cohen became one of the leading cases interpreting the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protection of freedom of speech.
[edit] Trivia
- According to legend, when he was preparing to argue Cohen v. California, Nimmer was advised to use the euphemism "four-letter word" in referring to the inscriptions on his client's shirt. However, when he appeared before the Supreme Court, he repeated the words "Fuck the Draft" several times, purportedly to emphasize that freedom of expression sometimes requires the use of words that otherwise should not be heard in polite company.
- "Nimmer on Copyright" is now edited by his son David Nimmer, also a professor at the UCLA School of Law
- Melville's other son, Larry Nimmer, documents legal cases as an award winning producer and director living in Santa Barbara, Ca. (Nimmer.net, GirlManMedia)
