Here is a link to the video of the Shakespeare authorship “moot court” or “mock trial” debate held at American University in Washington, D.C., on September 25, 1987, before three justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. The debate was first broadcast on C-SPAN on November 25, 1987. Here is the description on the C-SPAN website:
“Three U.S. Supreme Court Justices heard a moot court debate over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. The mock trial was organized to explore the theory that Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the actual author of the plays, writing under the pseudonym of Shakespeare.”
More discussion of this historic 1987 debate appears in this article published after the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, generally surveying the surprising prevalence of Shakespeare authorship doubts, and the Oxfordian theory in particular, on the Supreme Court. The late Justice John Paul Stevens, a participant in the 1987 debate, later became one of the most prominent Oxfordians ever.
[posted Aug. 24, 2012, updated 2021]
