Lawyerly theater

Good stuff:

The suit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America has yet to go to trial, but Nesson's recent tactics have drawn criticism, even among the association's most outspoken foes. In the past few weeks, he has tape-recorded a telephone conference with a federal judge and opposing counsel, and then - after US District Judge Nancy Gertner of Boston told him to shut it off - posted the record ing on his blog and featured it in a take-home exam on evidence for his students.

Nesson also posted dissenting e-mails from academics he had hoped to call as expert witnesses for the defense but who rejected his legal theory that Joel Tenenbaum had the right to download songs under the fair use doctrine of copyright law. And he put up a four-minute recording of his wife, Fern, a former Harvard law student of Nesson's, denigrating the experts as misguided naysayers and one of Nesson's law students working on the case as a "schmuck."