Legal News

S&C Associate?s Law Review Article Makes Cameo in Heller Opinion

By Dan Slater

For all the drubbing that associate life takes, we’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate one BigLaw associate whose scholarship was honored yesterday in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Heller.

At page 51, Justice Scalia, writing for the court, cited a law review article entitled, “The Peculiar Story of United States v. Miller,” which appeared this year in the NYU Journal of Law and Liberty. The author, Brian Frye, hangs his hat at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, where he’s a first-year associate (with two clerkships under his belt). At Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Eugene Volokh, whose work was also cited in the Court’s Heller opinion, writes, “Citations to such articles by people who aren’t academics, and who aren’t solidly established in their field . . . are especially rare, and especially worth noting.”

Justice Scalia cites Frye in the context of arguing that Justice Stevens’s dissent is “wrongheaded” in its reliance on Miller — the Court’s last Second Amendment case from 1939. According to Scalia, “[Miller] did not even purport to be a thorough examination of the Second Amendment . . . The respondent made no appearance in the case, neither filing a brief nor appearing at oral argument; the Court heard from no one but the Government (reason enough, one would think, not to make that case the beginning and end of this Court’s consideration of the Second Amendment.)” Then, writing Frye into legal history, Scalia writes: “See Frye ….”

We reached out to Frye but he’s apparently on a (well deserved) vacation. We’ll let you know if we hear from him.

The picture to the right is from Frye’s S&C bio. The picture above, however, was taken from his bio at Peripheral Produce, “an experimental film and video” organization that began as a screening series for “local experimental” film and video and later grew into “a video distribution label.” Apparently, Frye — whose bio lists him as a “curator, freelance journalist, and lawyer” — has been a contributor to Peripheral Produce.

According to the site, Frye, born in San Francisco in 1974, “spent his childhood in Santa Rosa (immortalized as the creepiest town in California in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt),” received a BA from Berkeley, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a JD from NYU, after which he clerked for Richard Sanders (Supreme Court of Washington) and Andrew Kleinfeld (Court of Appeals for Ninth Circuit). The site also says he’s a co-founder of New York’s Robert Beck Memorial Cinema and has written about film in publications such as Film Comment, Civilization, Cineaste, the Independent Film and Video Monthly and Millennium Film Journal.

As for Frye’s films, his work has been shown in the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival. For $19.95, you can download Frye’s “Waste-book #1″ from the Peripheral Produce Web site. It’s apparently a compilation of seven films: “Robert Beck is Alive and Well and Living in NYC”; “The Anatomy of Melancholy”; “Kaddish”; “Oona’s Veil”; “The Letter”; “Across the Rappahannoc”; and “Lachrymae.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 27, 2008 (boomark / email).