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December 21, 2006
Totally prurient!
Well, I'm a dork. I was flipping channels last night, and I came upon C-SPAN's coverage of oral argument in Fox v. FCC, in which Fox is apparently trying to avoid a fine after Cher and Nicole Richie said "fuck" on a live broadcast. This was fascinating to me, though I didn't entirely get the whole argument because a) I kept walking out of the room, and b)you won't usually know what is going on in an oral argument anyway because the lawyers and judges don't want to waste time explaining the case when they already know all the facts and want to argue only the crucial points.
Anyway, watching the esteemed U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrangle over the issues was great, mostly because it exposed a lot of FCC hypocrisy in that they get upset over a measly little f-bomb but don't bat an eye when primetime TV has a body count to rival a John Woo flick. Oh yeah, and because I got to hear the Honorable Pierre N. Leval, Harvard Law School, say "fuck" multiple times. Another judge couldn't bring herself to say it. That has to be a lawyer's fantasy - to swear in court. I know it's mine.
As a matter of fact, I was telling a friend that the next time I had to do an oral argument at school, my whole argument would be "Everything that guy said, is bullshit." The My Cousin Vinny defense. It probably would not work.
Now it seemed to me that the judges were sympathetic to the Fox lawyer, and hostile to the FCC lawyer. The Fox guy sailed along, but the FCC's lawyer didn't have a lot of good answers to the judges' questions. Lucky for me, other people saw this as well. Click here and here for some other accounts of the festivities.
entry no. 692
Posted by oz115 at December 21, 2006 10:18 AM