What ever happened to Cohen of Cohen v. California? Or O’Brien of United States v. O’Brien? I’d like to know about them, and about figures in other constitutional law cases, especially First Amendment cases. (They would make for good notes in the Teacher’s Manual for my second edition.) If you have any information, please post it — with URLs or cites, if you’d be so good — in the comments. A few that I’m contributing myself:
-
Biographies of the Tinkers and Christopher Eckhardt, of Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. School District, the leading student speech case, are here.
-
Joe Roth, one of the kids whose parents successfully sued to strike down school prayer, in the Engel v. Vitale case, ended up being becoming chairman of Twentieth-Century Fox in 1989, eventually ran Disney Motion Pictures for six years, and in 2001 started a new studio, Revolution Studios. He also directed America’s Sweethearts (2001) and Revenge of the Nerds II (1987).
-
Matt Fraser, of Bethel School District v. Fraser, went on to run the debate program at Stanford.
-
Harry Connick, of Connick v. Myers, retired as D.A. in 2003, after a 30-year stint. He had been known as the “Singing D.A.” during his tenure, and has done some professional singing since then. His son, Harry Connick, Jr., is a noted musician.
-
The last of the Zacchini family (see Zacchini v. Scripps-Howard Broadcasting Co.) to do a human cannonball act was Edmondo Zacchini — apparently Hugo’s nephew — who flew his last flight in 1991. In 1991, the Zacchini family was inducted into Barnum Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s Circus Ring of Fame in Sarasota, Fla.. Hugo Zacchini was in his mid-70s when he performed the act that formed the basis of the Supreme Court case; and by the time the Supreme Court case was decided, he was dead (not a barrier to a lawsuit for damages, which would be taken over by his estate, but oddly enough the court opinions don’t even mention this).
-
In Cantrell v. Forest City Publishing Co. (1974), a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter named Joe Eszterhas apparently fictionalized a news story, which led to a false light invasion of privacy lawsuit against a newspaper:
Most conspicuously, although Mrs. Cantrell was not present at any time during the reporter’s visit to her home, Eszterhas wrote, ‘Margaret Cantrell will talk neither about what happened nor about how they are doing. She wears the same mask of non-expression she wore at the funeral. She is a proud woman. Her world has changed. She says that after it happened, the people in town offered to help them out with money and they refused to take it.’ Other significant misrepresentations were contained in details of Eszterhas’ descriptions of the poverty in which the Cantrells were living and the dirty and dilapidated conditions of the Cantrell home.
Eszterhas recognized that his flair for fiction made him better suited to a different career, and became a once-hot screenwriter (Flashdance, Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct).
So, more, more, please! The comments are ready for you to post.
UPDATE: Steve Kurtz points to a First Amendment Center page that also has follow-ups on Epperson (v. Arkansas), Goldman (v. Weinberger), Bates (v. Arizona), Lemon (v. Kurtzman), Kulhmeier (Hazelwood School Dist. v.), Maynard (Wooley v.), Pickering (v. Board of Ed.), Sindermann (Perry v.), Fraser, and Myers (Connick v.), as well as the Tinker kids, whom I mentioned above.
Comments are closed.