A remarkable turn of events in a case I sadly wasn’t aware of before this article was published. It involves Larry Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons project, who is currently pursuing a negligence action on behalf of a former pupil of the American Boychoir School, where Lessig himself was evidently abused as a boy. The article linked to below also includes a profile of the reluctant public figure that is Harvard Law’s star professor. At times it is biting in criticism of Lessig’s intellectual record but is nonetheless generally affectionate towards him. Worth a read.

Lawrence Lessig’s other court case:

A dramatic update on Professor Lawrence Lessig’s other court case written by his friend John Heilemann appears in New York Metro magazine this week. And this is a battle that critics as well as supporters are praying will end in victory for the lawyer and scholar this time.

Lessig is representing John Hardwicke, who like himself is a former pupil of the American Boychoir School (now the Columbus Boychoir School) in Princeton, New Jersey. Hardwicke claims he was abused by multiple staff including the music director. The school argued it should be immune from such negligence lawsuits, and a trial court had agreed. Incredibly, the school even claimed the sex between now fugitive choir director and Hardwicke was consensual. The case was heard by the state’s supreme court, and in what reads like a movie script, the evidence turned on Lessig himself.

In the court room, Lessig tore up the rule book and confronted years of private torment by revealing that he had been abused himself at the school.

“It was the perversion of this music director . . . to believe that sexual abuse was part of producing a wonderful boychoir,” he disclosed to the court. Lessig said he knew that this was what the director believed, because the director himself had disclosed this to Lessig at the school.

(Via The Register.)