The First Amendment seemed to be in full bloom at Harvard. No one was being prevented from

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—s 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. 113 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017200