nbc Roberts quotes Dylan nbc
- From: Joe <obri6133@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:12:48 -0700 (PDT)
Bob Dylan makes Supreme Court debut in dissent
By Adam Liptak
Sunday, June 29, 2008
The last chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court liked light opera.
The new one cites Bob Dylan. Four pages into his dissent last Monday
in an achingly boring dispute between pay phone companies and long
distance carriers, John Roberts Jr., the chief justice of the United
States, put a song lyric where the citation to precedent usually goes.
"The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that
respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack
Article III standing," Roberts wrote. "'When you got nothing, you got
nothing to lose.' Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61
Revisited (Columbia Records 1965)."
Alex Long, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and perhaps
the nation's leading authority on the citation of popular music in
judicial opinions, said this was almost certainly the first use of a
rock lyric to buttress a legal proposition in a Supreme Court
decision. "It's a landmark opinion," Long said.
But Dylan has been cited only once before as an authority on Article
III standing, which concerns who can bring a lawsuit in federal court.
His key contribution to legal discourse has been in another area.
"The correct rule on the necessity of expert testimony has been
summarized by Bob Dylan: 'You don't need a weatherman to know which
way the wind blows,"' a California appeals court wrote in 1981, citing
"Subterranean Homesick Blues." Eighteen other decisions have cited
that lyric.
Roberts's predecessor, William Rehnquist, cited his beloved Gilbert &
Sullivan in a 1980 dissent from a decision that the news media had a
constitutional right of access to court proceedings. He was still an
associate justice, and he thought the court had made up the right out
of whole cloth.
In rebuttal, Rehnquist relied on the Lord Chancellor in "Iolanthe" to
rebuke the majority. "The Law is the true embodiment of everything
that's excellent," the Lord Chancellor says. "It has no kind of fault
or flaw, and I, my Lords, embody the Law."
That made Rehnquist's point. The Roberts citation is more problematic.
On the one hand, he showed excellent taste. "Like a Rolling Stone," as
Greil Marcus, a writer and music journalist, has written, is "the
greatest record ever made, perhaps, or the greatest record that ever
would be made."
On the other hand, Roberts gets the citation wrong, proving that he is
neither an originalist nor a strict constructionist. What Dylan
actually sings is, "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to
lose." It's true that many Web sites, including Dylan's official one,
reproduce the lyric as Roberts does. But a more careful Dylanist might
have consulted his recording.
"It was almost certainly the clerks who provided the citation," Long
said. "I suppose their use of the Internet to check the lyrics
violates one of the first rules they learned when they were all on law
review: When quoting, always check the quote with the original source,
not someone else's characterization of what the source said."
The larger objection is that the citation is not true to the original
point Dylan was making, which was about the freedom that having
nothing conveys and not about who may sue a phone company. (See, e.g.
"Me and Bobby McGee.")
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