Opinion: There was no way I was going to overrule her motion
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Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has tickled the press corps’ funny bone with an unorthodox opinion dissenting from the court’s refusal to hear a search-and-seizure case from my native Pennsylvania. Here’s the money, I mean funny, quote:
Narcotics Strike Force, North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three-dollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He’d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood. ‘Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner. Another approached. Quick exchange of words. Cash handed over; small objects handed back. Each man then quickly on his own way. Devlin knew the guy wasn’t buying bus tokens. He radioed a description and Officer Stein picked up the buyer. Sure enough: three bags of crack in the guy’s pocket. Head downtown and book him. Just another day at the office.
Roberts’ parody of hard-boiled detective fiction -- which reporters variously characterized as channeling Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler -- was clever, but hardly a laugh riot. The sensation it caused may be explained by the fact that, as Sam Johnson famously said, ‘it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ Johnson was referring to a woman preaching, which he compared in its exoticism to ‘a dog walking on his legs.’
Judges who crack wise in their opinions are almost as rare as bipedal beagles. But they do exist. Long before Roberts put on his stylistic fedora, Justice Mike Eakin of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was notorious (at least among readers of the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia papers) for writing opinions in verse -- or doggerel, depending on your critical standards. For example,while serving on a state appeals court, Eakin rendered an opinion about a prenuptial agreement in a divorce case in four-line stanzas like this:
He’d had a prenup with his previous wife
And sought to avoid any mischief or strife
By asking his bride for a prenup himself
To allow her to insulate personal wealth.
Eakin eventually took his versifying to a new level -- the state Supreme Court -- and inspired dissents from two colleagues who thought his ‘poetic justice’ detracted from the dignity of the court. No word on whether some of Roberts’ colleagues are offended by his excursion into detective-speak. But at least one, Justice Anthony Kennedy, signed the opinion, offering Roberts some encouragement to wax literary again. Maybe he’ll take a cue from Justice Eakin and attempt an opinion in verse. But what rhymes with ‘Guantanamo’?