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4.2.12
WC: 191694

The First Amendment seemed to be in full bloom at Harvard. No one was being prevented from
expressing his or her views. The Quincy House Film Society was going to show Deep Throat; the
Harvard administration was expressing but not imposing its views; the feminists were preparing
pamphlets, slide shows, and speakers to present theirs; and everyone was free to see and listen to
all or none of these expressions.

The feminists seemed to be making their point quite effectively: more students were expected on
the picket lines and at the slide show than at the movie itself. Many in the Harvard community,
while supporting the right of the Quincy House Film Society to show Deep Throat, now believed
that the society had been insensitive to the feelings of their feminist housemates by exhibiting an
offensive film in the dormitory that was home to them all. I shared that view.

Then everything changed. Days before the scheduled showing, two women residents of Quincy
House, not satisfied to protest and picket, called the local District Attorney’s office and asked the
police to prevent the showing of Deep Throat and to arrest the students who were planning to
show it.

The local District Attorney was an elderly political hack named John Droney, who had repeatedly
won reelection on an uncompromising law-and-order platform. When he learned that the twin
evils of obscenity and Harvard might merge on that fateful night, he dispatched an assistant to
court in an effort to secure an injunction against the scheduled showing.

If there is anything more obnoxious to a civil libertarian than the punishment of speech after it has
taken place, it is the issuance of a prior injunction to prevent speech in the first place. Prior
restraint—as an injunction against speech has come to be known—is the purest form of
censorship. It seeks to prevent the speech from ever reaching the public. Now, almost ten years
after the Supreme Court had rebuffed efforts to enjoin publication of the Pentagon Papers, the
District Attorney of Middlesex County was seeking to enjoin the showing of a dirty movie to a
small group of students in a college dormitory at Harvard.

Only hours before the scheduled performance, Carl Stork and Nathan J. Hagen—the co-
presidents of the Quincy House Film Society—received telephone calls from the D.A.’s office
directing them to be in Judge Charles R. Alberti’s courtroom at two o’clock for a hearing. Stork
and Hagen tried to call me in my office. But I was at lunch, and my secretary couldn’t locate me.
Stork and Hagen told her the story and requested that I come to the court to assist them as soon
as possible. I returned from lunch at two-fifteen, to learn that I was expected in court—fifteen
minutes earlier!

I quickly borrowed a colleague’s ill-fitting jacket, dug an old brown tie out of my desk drawer,
and drove to the courthouse in downtown Cambridge.

Within minutes, I found myself before Judge Alberti, arguing against the injunction. With no
books, cases, or statutes in my possession, I had to wing it. The judge was most understanding,
asking the Assistant District Attorney to let me look over his shoulder at the relevant statute and
cases.

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