Melville Bernard Nimmer (June 6, 1923 - November 23, 1985) was an American lawyer and law professor, renowned as an expert in freedom of speech and United States copyright law.
Nimmer graduated from UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Harvard Law School. He was admitted to the California State Bar in January 1951. He was professor at the UCLA School of Law from 1962. One year later, he published the two-volume treatise that would become the leading secondary source on copyright law, Nimmer on Copyright. In 1984, he published a one-volume treatise on freedom of speech, titled appropriately Nimmer on Freedom of Speech: Treatise on Theory of First Amendment.
As a lawyer, he was best known as the winning attorney in the 1971 case Cohen v. California. In Cohen, the Supreme Court of the United States, by a 5-4 vote in an opinion written by Justice Harlan, held that a state cannot criminalize speech absent a particularized and compelling reason. The Court struck down the conviction of a 19-year-old man who had walked into the Los Angeles courthouse with a shirt reading Fuck the Draft. Cohen became one of the leading cases interpreting the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protection of freedom of speech.
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Melville Bernard Nimmer (June 6, 1923 - November 23, 1985) was an American lawyer and law professor, renowned as an expert in freedom of speech and United States copyright law.
Nimmer graduated from UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Harvard Law School. He was admitted to the California State Bar in January 1951. He was professor at the UCLA School of Law from 1962. One year later, he published the two-volume treatise that would become the leading secondary source on copyright law, Nimmer on Copyright. In 1984, he published a one-volume treatise on freedom of speech, titled appropriately Nimmer on Freedom of Speech: Treatise on Theory of First Amendment.
As a lawyer, he was best known as the winning attorney in the 1971 case Cohen v. California. In Cohen, the Supreme Court of the United States, by a 5-4 vote in an opinion written by Justice Harlan, held that a state cannot criminalize speech absent a particularized and compelling reason. The Court struck down the conviction of a 19-year-old man who had walked into the Los Angeles courthouse with a shirt reading Fuck the Draft. Cohen became one of the leading cases interpreting the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protection of freedom of speech.
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Cited by Articles (0-5 Years)
171
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This metric counts the number of times this author has been cited by other articles in HeinOnline beyond the past five years only. Citation sources include the Bluebook, Prince's Bieber Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations, and the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.
Cited by Cases (0-5 Years)
1
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Cited by Cases (5+ Years)
98
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Accessed (Past 12 Months)
439
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ScholarRank
511
ScholarRank is an overall ranking based on the calculation of five HeinOnline ScholarCheck metrics. The Z-score for each of the five metrics is taken and then averaged; the final average is entered into standard competition ranking to produce the overall ScholarRank for each author. Further information on HeinOnline's ScholarRank may be found in our Knowledge Base.
Average Citations per Article
91.59
This metric counts the cumulative number of times this author has been cited by other articles, then divides this number by this author's total number of articles written, to calculate the average number of citations per article.
Average Citations per Document
83.00
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Self-Citations
14
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H-Index
19.00
The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of an author. The index is based on the set of the author's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. Further information on an h-index can be found here.