Bruce Rosen - a former journalist , and now excellent media lawyer is my colleague on the Editorial Board of the New Jersey Law Journal.. He has posted on the Media Law Resource Center website a very readable and appealing memoir of his long, diverse, unfinished career.
When did you know you wanted to be a lawyer?
Well, I was always and still am an arguer, and in high school in central New Jersey I was an anti-Vietnam War activist and editor of our own underground newspaper called “Conscience.” In 1970-71 there was a TV show called “Storefront Lawyers,” that sort of inspired me further to law, but I didn’t really have the resources to go right after college but had had a paid internship with the Woodbridge (NJ) News Tribune while in college and also covered DC for them as a stringer while at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service – including covering Nixon’s resignation. I left school and went directly to work there. Law had to wait. Later, I was working for the Bergen Record covering government and politics and rock music on the side.
Bruce Springsteen at the Capitol Theatre,
Passaic where I interviewed him in 1978.
But I really got the bug to go to law school while covering the Abscam trials in Brooklyn in 1980-81, especially the trial of U.S. Sen. Harrison Williams, where I was second guessing the defense lawyers and thought, “well I could do that!” Around that time, The Record started a tuition reimbursement program that paid for most of my law school. I went to school at night and covered the courts during the day. I was married with two small kids (wasn’t easy for any of us).
How did you get interested in media law? What was your first job?
My first real law job was clerking for the late U.S. District Judge H. Lee Sarokin in Newark in 1985. I had profiled him as a stringer for the National Law Journal and he knew I was in my last year of night classes at Seton Hall Law School and asked me if I’d be interested in doing a temporary clerkship so I could help him write a major opinion. It turned out to be the habeas corpus decision that freed Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the middleweight boxer convicted twice for a triple murder, and later a film starring Denzel Washington.
I was always interested in media law. As a federal clerk, I finagled an interview with Floyd Abrams at Cahill Gordon, but he told me they hadn’t hired anyone from Seton Hall before, and I guess they already had a stable of ex-reporters. I briefly went back to The Record but soon left to take over editing the New Jersey Law Journal when Steve Brill bought it, and I became executive editor for all of the American Lawyer media legal papers.
After five years, Steve’s attention moved to Court TV and I left to join Lowenstein Sandler, where one of the lawyers was friends with the late Doug Jacobs who led litigation at CBS. Doug gave us the case of a New Jersey lawyer who sued over allegations he had hired a runner for his personal injury practice (and who candidly discussed fees without asking about the injury to a hatcam). The case settled for a half-apology. Doug also made sure that I started writing the N.J. chapter for the MLRC’s 50-State Survey.
***** Keep Reading for lots more interesting stuff.
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