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20 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 1107 (2009-2010)
Of Cameras and Courtrooms

handle is hein.journals/frdipm20 and id is 1125 raw text is: Of Cameras and Courtrooms Alex Kozinski & Robert Johnson* INTRODUCTION ............................................ 1107 I. IN THE COURTROOM ................................. 1109 II. OUTSIDE THE COURTROOM ........................... 1119 CONCLUSION............................................ 1129 APPENDIX ....................................... ...... 1130 INTRODUCTION You can't talk about cameras in the courtroom without talking about The Juice. And we'll get there. But this tale actually begins earlier, with a 1935 trial described by H.L. Mencken as the greatest story since the Resurrection.' The defendant, Bruno A PDF version of this Article is available online at http://iplj.netfblog/archives/ volumexxlbook4. Visit http://iplj.netlblog/archives for access to the IPLJ archive. Alex Kozinski is Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Robert Johnson was his law clerk. I David A. Sellers, The Circus Comes to Town: The Media and High-Profile Trials, 71 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 181, 182 (2008). The quote may be apocryphal, but it shows up in so many sources, always attributed to Mencken, that it seems irrelevant at this point whether he actually said it. He ought to have. The story of broadcasting from the courtroom actually begins earlier, with the radio broadcast of the infamous Scopes monkey trial. See L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP, THE GREAT MONKEY TRIAL 160 (1968). Mencken was present for that trial, too. See, e.g., H.L. MENCKEN, A RELIGIOUS ORGY IN TENNESSEE: A REPORTER'S ACCOUNT OF THE SCOPES MONKEY TRIAL (2006). As Mencken tells it, the local residents didn't react kindly to the publicity in that case: [W]hen the main guard of Eastern and Northern journalists swarmed down . . . then the yokels began to sweat coldly, and in a few days they were full of terror and indignation. . . . When the last of [the journalists] departs Daytonians will disinfect the town with sulphur candles . ... 1107