He was born to a Jewish family in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and grew up in Plattsburgh, upstate New York, where his parents owned a chain of women's wear stores. When he was 16, his family moved to Forest Hills, Queens, and he later attended Columbia University and Columbia Law School. In 1960, he started work as an unpaid intern for a law firm working on the estates of Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday. Over the next few years he developed a love of jazz music, did some legal work for Moe Asch at Folkways Records, and began advising jazz and rhythm and blues musicians on copyrights and contracts. Bernard Stollman feature in 801 Magazine, 17 April 2008 Clifford Allen, Bernard Stollman: The ESP-Disk Story, AllAboutJazz.com, 21 November 2005
