Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Email Professor Nesson [ nesson@law.harvard.edu ]
617 495-4609
5 Hubbard
Park Rd.
Cambridge MA. 02138
Favorites:
Book: A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr
Movie: My Cousin Vinny
Album: Void Dweller, by Eon
As an undergraduate at Harvard, class of '60 [ http://www.harvard60.org/ ], I took a course on the Univac One, 1958. The final assignment was to program the machine to sort a list or words alphabetically . This was before silicon chips and computer language. The Univac was built with stacks of vacuum tubes that occupied a large room and looked just like the stacks in a library, except the shelves were filled with vacuum tubes instead of books. We controlled the machine from a separate control room that looked like the deck of the Starship Enterprise. We wrote our instructions to the machine in strings of one's and zero's. For our exam, we had twenty minutes at the controls to debug our program and run it on a test list. Our grade depended, first, on whether our program worked, and then, second, on our program's elegance, measured by the time our program took to sort the list.
My next real engagement with computers came in 1981, when, on my first sabbatical, I moved my family to the seashore of Long Island, accompanied by one of the first edition IBM PC's. In my spare time there I wrote a computer program in BASIC that played an excellent game of five-card draw jacks-or-better poker, the rights to which I sold for a pile of money to a company which, I am sad to say, was subsequently indicted for manufacturing illegal gambling equipment. The BASIC language, circa 1981, included the word "SORT" among its verbs. Coming upon it was like meeting an old friend, now part of a whole useful language built of ones and zeros. If I could make a word from digits, and a generation later use such words to program a computer that could bluff me out, then, perhaps in a future generation, I would be able to use the power of the new language to liven up my classes.
Professor Charles R. Nesson |
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| Degrees |
Harvard College: A.B. 1960 Harvard Law School: J.D. 1963
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| Occupation |
William F. Weld Professor of Law, Harvard Law School |
| Prior Experience |
Clerk to Mr. Justice Harlan on the United States Supreme Court, 1965 Term Special Assistant, Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice |
| Harvard Activities |
Joined Harvard Law School Faculty in 1966, tenured in 1969 Associate Dean, 1979-1982 Organizer and President of the Lawyers' Military Defense Committee, 1969-1972 Director of Harvard Evidence Film Project, 1974-1979 Specialty Course: Evidence Additional Courses: Internet, Torts, Criminal Law, Advocacy, Ethics |
| Publications |
Text: Green & Nesson, Problems, Cases and Materials on Evidence (Little Brown) Articles: Various generally dealing with the nature of judicial proof: Constitutional Hearsay: Requiring Foundational Testing and Corroboration
under the Confrontation Clause 81 Va. L. Rev. 149 (1995), with Yochai Benkler
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| Litigation |
Committee (1974) Counsel in various civil liberties cases including:
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| Media |
Television and Seminar Moderator for the Fred Friendly Seminars (Media & Society Program of the Columbia University) (1974-present) Moderator for the PBS series The Constitution: That Delicate Balance, produced by Fred Friendly and Media & Society Seminars of Columbia University (1986) Ethics in America (1989) Moderator for CBS, Eye on the Media: Media and Business Moderator for Granada Television programs on The Right to Die, International Bribery, and Terrorism Advocate on The Advocates (WGBH) Narrator for the film Three Appeals (about the appellate process of the State of New York, made by WNET) The Shooting of Big Man (a commentary about a murder, made for ABC) |
Copyright 1998 http://cyber.law.harvard.edu