David Boies Quotations

I think when you have as many lawyers that are involved on both sides, there is a danger that they all try to find something to do.

Here you have a new technology, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It's just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.

It is easy to be accurate if you have the freedom to be complicated, and it is very easy to be simple if you have the freedom to shade the truth. What's hard is to be simple and very accurate, and that takes work to figure out what are the simple truths that are going to sustain your case.

The Audio Home Recording Act directly says that noncommercial copying by consumers is lawful.

When you think of Napster, you think of music. But the first thing that struck me was that this was an important case not only for the music industry but for the whole Internet.

Obviously Im a lawyer; I like to have cases.

Napster's only alleged liability is for contributory or vicarious infringement. So when Napster's users engage in noncommercial sharing of music, is that activity copyright infringement? No.

I think what it was about was the people's right to vote and have those votes counted. And if you think back through our history, an awful lot of what we've fought over, struggled for, is the right of people to vote. That's what the civil-rights movement was, at its bottom, about. At the fundamental level, democracy means a government in which the people vote.

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.

But I'd say my best boss was Tom Barr, who was a partner at Cravath, Swain & Moore in the 1960s. It's because I learned so much from him.