Rick Cotton, in
addition to being
a knowledgeable
and distinguished
attorney, has
been a great
champion of the
fight against
digital piracy and
counterfeiting,”
says U.S. Rep.
Lamar Smith.
“Rick is a determined, dedicated leader
in the fight to protect American creativity
and innovation from the blight of digital
theft,” adds Jay D. Roth, national executive
director of the Directors Guild of America.
“He’s committed to the issue, incredibly
knowledgeable and eloquent about the
harm digital theft causes across many
industries, and altogether someone we’re
fortunate to have on our side.”
COTTON, NOW 68, GREW UP ON THE
South Side of Chicago in a family of liberal
Democrats who lived and breathed public
issues. “Dinner was always watching the
evening news,” he says. What network?
Cotton laughs. “It must have been NBC,”
he says. “Huntley-Brinkley.”
His father was a labor union lawyer and
his mother a PTA activist. In high school,
Cotton was moved by President Kennedy’s
1961 inaugural “Ask not” speech and knew
he wanted a career involving public policy.
He considered journalism.
That’s the direction he seemed to be
heading. He edited his high school student
newspaper, then began working on The
Harvard Crimson as a freshman sportswriter
and ended up its president as a senior. He
interviewed many of the leading figures of
the day, including Martin Luther King Jr. and
Robert F. Kennedy. The Harvard campus
roiled amid the civil rights movement of the
1960s, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy
assassination, and the drug controversy
involving Professor Timothy “Turn on, tune
in, drop out” Leary. In 1963, Harvard began
granting degrees to women at Radcliffe
College, and, before he graduated in 1965,
Cotton wrote a parting editorial noting the
“final and complete surrender” to coeducation amongst other changes for his
graduating class.
He applied to law schools but deferred
for a year and returned to Chicago to
work as a general assignment reporter
for Newsweek. He liked the work, but
after that year, when it came down to a
choice—going to Vietnam as a reporter
for Newsweek or going to law school—he
chose law school. “Instead of reporting
on others, I wanted to be the one doing
things,” he says.
He defected from Harvard to Yale Law
School for its emphasis on public policy
and public service. He devoted himself
to public interest law and served as
executive editor of The Yale Law Journal. “I
never thought I’d be a corporate lawyer,”
he says. He didn’t even take classes in
corporate law or tax. After graduating
cum laude in 1969, he served clerkships
with two legendary jurists: Judge J. Skelly
Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals and
Supreme Court Justice William Brennan.
He then spent several years practicing
legal aid and public interest law, first in
New Hampshire, then in California, where
he worked for the Natural Resources
Defense Council, taught law at the
University of California at Berkeley and
volunteered for Gov. Jerry Brown’s 1976
presidential campaign. In 1977, he joined
the Carter administration as deputy
executive secretary of the Department
of Health, Education and Welfare under
Joseph Califano. In 1978, he moved up to
become Califano’s executive secretary.
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