Charles Nesson

CharlesNesson
Member of the Nexa Board of Trustees

Main affiliation: Harvard University (USA)

Charles Rothwell Nesson is the William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and of the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society. He is author of Evidence, with Murray and Green, and has participated in several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. In 1971, Nesson defended Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case. He was co-counsel for the plaintiffs in the case against W.R. Grace that was made into the film A Civil Action.
Nesson attended Harvard College as an undergraduate, and then Harvard Law School where he joined the list of only a handful of people in history to have graduated summa cum laude. 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. 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 in 1969.
He is “currently leading a project to reify university as a meta player in cyberspace, to legitimize and teach poker and the value of strategic poker thinking, and to advance restorative justice in Jamaica”. In 2006 he taught CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion with Rebecca Nesson and Gene Koo. He teaches courses in the law and practice of Evidence (how to prove the “truth”), Trials in Second Life, and a reading group with Fern Nesson on Freedom.