Cindi Scoppe — who, to my memory, doesn’t cite popular song lyrics all that often herself — liked this NPR item and shared it with me, and I share it with y’all:
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
How many times can a judge cite a song to adorn some obscure point of law? And how many times can a lawyer cite songs for the client he’s arguing for? Yes, and what if the song is a Bob Dylan song? Could it be a hundred times or more? Well, the answer, my friend, was 186 times. The answer was 186 times.
That is how often Bob Dylan lyrics were quoted in court filings and scholarly legal publications according to a study in 2007 by University of Tennessee law professor Alex Long, who joins us now from Knoxville.
You should go check it out. Apparently, neither the Beatles nor Springsteen nor anyone else comes close to Dylan, in terms of the number of times cited in legal documents. Apparently, the California court of appeals says “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” so often “that it’s almost boilerplate.”
The Rolling Stones come in sixth. You can probably guess what that would be. Yep. Because it’s true, in the law as in life: You can’t always get what you want.
Related Posts
And here, believe it or not, is yet another item on the subject.
I’m sure y’all will be glad to know that someone out there is keeping track of all this…
Here, for your further edification, is an LATimes story on the same subject.
Shades of infamous radicals:
““You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” …”
Code for the Weather Underground?
Dylan’s signature protest songs, “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” gave voice to nothing more fundamental than Liberalism.
I watched Dylan perform in Boston and mingled with the Hippie element in the Haight. I know, and shame on NPR for such sophomoric blather!
Dylan is talented and iconic. What NPR misses is that the judiciary is infested with an element of left-leaning music trivia fiends rather than disciplined legal scholars; that is no small oversight in my opinion, Brad.
When I was in law school, they always made exceptions for Louisiana (because of its civil law roots) and California (because of its Dylan law roots?)
A lawyer friend told me he actually heard Justice Costa Pleicones, now of the SC Supreme Court but at the time sitting on the Circuit Court trial bench, quote the Rolling Stones. Said Judge Pleicones to the lawyer who wanted a break in his trial to give him time to get a particular witness to the courthouse, “The Rolling Stones. 1969. You can’t always get what you want. Call your next witness.” Yet another reason Justice Pleicones is one of my favorite judges.
I spent a few hours sitting in Municipal Court recently, and the judge made at least one reference to a musician — but it was a jazz musician I don’t know from the 60’s. On a side note, I was pretty disappointed with the quality of that court — never been in court before, but do judges often get themselves cofused with Judge Judy? Is that a common problem around here?
The local “Judge Judy” is often said to be Leslie Riddle, in Family Court.
The problem is that we don’t want our judges to be too aloof or arrogant–we want them to be regular folks just like us–or we complain and they don’t get re=appointed. We get what we asked for….
Judge Judy deals with the same sort of small fry cases, so the parallel is not out of line…
Well, this was actually a man, so maybe we have two!