State of Play V: Speakers' Bios

Profile

 As an undergraduate Charles Nesson 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. The students controlled the machine from a separate control room that looked like the deck of the Starship Enterprise and wrote instructions to the machine in strings of one's and zero's. For the exam, Nesson had twenty minutes at the controls to debug the program and run it on a test list. His grade depended, first, on whether the program worked, and then, second, on the program's elegance, measured by the time the program took to sort the list.

Nesson's next real engagement with computers came in 1981, when, on his first sabbatical, he moved his family to the seashore of Long Island, accompanied by one of the first edition IBM PC's. In his spare time there he wrote a computer program in BASIC that played an excellent game of five-card draw jacks-or-better poker, the rights to which he sold for a pile of money to a company which, he is 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 for Nesson, now part of a whole useful language built of ones and zeros. If he 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, he would be able to use the power of the new language to liven up his classes.. 

Web Presence

Selected Publications

• Green, Nesson & Murray, Evidence (3rd ed. Aspen)

• Constitutional Hearsay: Requiring Foundational Testing and Corroboration under the Confrontation Clause, 81 Va. L. Rev. 149 (1995), with Yochai Benkler

• Incentives to Spoliate Evidence in Civil Litigation: The Need for Vigorous Judicial Action, 13 Cardozo L. Rev. 793 (1991).

• Agent Orange Meets the Blue Bus: Factfinding at the Frontier of Knowledge, 66 B.U.L. Rev. 521 (1986)