Nathan Burkan

Nathan Burkan (November 8, 1879 – June 6, 1936) was a Romanian-born Jewish-American lawyer from New York. Life Burkan was born on November 8, 1879 in Iași, Romania, the son of Moritz Burkan and Tillie Armm. Burkan immigrated to America in 1886 and settled with his family in the Lower East Side in New York City, New York, where his father operated a series of luncheonettes and pool rooms in the red-light district. He was enrolled in the City College of New York when he was fifteen and graduated three years later. He then did a two-year course at the New York University School of Law, graduating from there in 1899. As he was too young to be admitted to the state bar that year, he initially worked as a stenographer with lawyer Julius Lehmann in the Woolworth Building. He was admitted to the bar in 1900. Burkan wasn't a member of a white-shoe firm and never had any partners, although he did have associates and at one point occupied an entire floor of the Continental Building at Broadway and 41st Street. His first major client was light opera composer Victor Herbert. A copyright attorney, a number of his clients were important figures in show business, like Charlie Chaplin and Florenz Ziegfeld, and motion picture companies like United Artists, Columbia Picture Association, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In 1930, he successfully defended Mae West when she faced obscenity charges over her show Pleasure Man, only to reportedly sue her afterwards for failing to pay his fees. He appeared on behalf of Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt in the custody battle over her daughter Gloria. In 1906, he testified before Congress on behalf of the Music Publishers Association to increase copyright protection for intellectual property owners. This led to the Copyright Act of 1909. In 1914, he helped Victor Herbert, Irving Berlin, and other composers and music publishers to form the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in order to protect their intellectual rights. As part of the ASCAP's efforts to sell licenses to businesses that wanted to play their music, Burkan filed a lawsuit on behalf of Herbert against a New York City restaurant that played Herbert's song Sweethearts. The lawsuit, Herbert v. Shanley Co., reached the United States Supreme Court, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes sided with Herbert and the ASCAP. His clients also included Samuel Goldwyn, Arthur M. Loew, Ernst Lubitsch, Constance Bennett, Walter Wanger, and Jesse Lasky.