On October 16, 1979, the Court of Appeals allowed still and motion picture cameras into the courtroom during oral argument for the first time in court history. Chief Judge Lawrence H. Cooke permitted the cameras in the court room as an experiment to determine if they would be disruptive to the proceedings. He also permitted NY-SCAN to not only broadcast the arguments in real time but also show portions of them a few months later in a polished NY-SCAN program that did a deep dive on a few of the cases, with narration supplied by a Harvard Law School Professor (Charles Nesson) along with interviews of some of the lawyers that delivered arguments. Suffice it to say, Chief Judge Cooke’s experiment proved to be a brilliant success. The Court of Appeals’ oral arguments have been broadcast live for many years.
The first picture shows Judges Sol Wachtler and Bernard S. Meyer listening to an argument, with a TV camera behind them recording the event. The second picture shows sitting at counsel table a beloved former board member of the Historical Society, Roy L. Reardon, with a TV camera behind him. A portion of Roy’s argument can be seen (along with a description of his case) in the video of the NY-SCAN program, which you can access here. Roy also speaks about his experience in front of the camera in our Oral History Project, accessible here.
