David Nimmer

David Nimmer plays tennis, sings operatic excerpts, and supervises personnel in charitable endeavors—all at a very low level of skill. Happily, those deficits are counterbalanced by several aspects in which he has attained some distinction.

First is the area of copyright law. As the author of the thrice-annual revisions to Nimmer on Copyright, he has found his words quoted in some 3,000 judicial opinions. The United States Supreme Court has cited Nimmer on Copyright on numerous occasions, as has every federal appellate court, countless district and state courts, and indeed courts confronting copyright cases in countries across the planet.

He has taught copyright at UCLA Law School for years and more recently as well at Cardozo Law School. But, since 1987, he has made his primary professional home at the law firm of Irell & Manella LLP, where he has represented clients in the entertainment, publishing, and high-technology fields. He has twice gone to Washington D.C. on behalf of clients whose copyright matters were before the Supreme Court. The first occasion resulted in a unanimous decision in favor of his client, which simultaneously drew the boundaries between copyright and trademark protection. The second matter awaits resolution at present, in a matter of vital concern to all freelance writers in the country and the databases that present their historical works.

Other litigation highlights (together with talented lawyers from Irell & Manella) include successfully representing Matthew Bender & Co. before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in its quest to unlock West's effective monopoly on presenting judicial opinions; convincing the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to rebuff an opponent's attempt to have copyright law control manufacture of a universal garage door opener; and winning a case in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed his client unfettered rights to publish Jesus: A New Revelation. Along the way, other litigated cases have ranged from the status of Winnie-the-Pooh to the collected choreography of Martha Graham to the Google Books settlement in New York City (still pending, for which he represents the interests of Amazon.com).

Not only has Prof. Nimmer stayed busy writing Nimmer on Copyright for LexisNexis and representing clients, but he has also composed a series of influential articles. Kluwer Law International collected several dozen into two published anthologies, Copyright Illuminated and Sacred Text, Technology, and the DMCA. At present, he is co-authoring a book for Oxford University Press regarding five centuries of rabbinic copyright responsa, entitled From Maimonides to Microsoft (guaranteed to top bestseller lists everywhere).

Prof. Nimmer has given congressional testimony on behalf of the United States Telephone Association and the National Association of Broadcasters. In addition, he gave parliamentary testimony in Sydney on behalf of the Combined Newspaper and Magazine Copyright Committee of Australia. He once offered an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of Israel—which took six years to decide the case, in the process declining his offer. So he retaliated by publishing a 223-page article in the Houston Law Review, Copyright in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He has been named in The Best Lawyers in America and selected as a Southern California "Super Lawyer" by Los Angeles Magazine. He was recognized as a leading lawyer by Chambers USA: America's Leading Lawyers for Business in 2009 and the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journals named him one of California's "Top 10 Copyright Lawyers."

Second, and more importantly, he has been married for over thirty years, during which time he has offered sporadic assistance to his wife, Marcia, in raising their five children. She is the more talented (and hard-working) of the couple. Among their children, the eldest (age 24) got married last year, and the youngest (age 14) has just announced her intention of finishing tenth grade in Israel. He never knows where Jacob, Avi, Talia, Yonah, and Leora, along with their mother, are located at any given moment, but loves them all dearly.

Now, if only his backhand volley could improve …