I love, love, love it when I stumble across totally random and utterly hilarious footnotes in judicial opinions. Wild-goose chase research is my least favorite part of my new job working for The Man, so it was delightful to discover that a judge cares enough about me (and others like me) to force his poor clerk to do hours of research digging up a random asstortment of movie quotes to pepper his opinion with.
A few examples:
Text of opinion: "Block-booking, a per se violation of the antitrust laws is an illegal practice [FN21]..."
[FN21] "Damn it all, why is everything we're good at illegal?" Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (20th Century Fox 1969).
Text: "Defendants ask this Court [FN29]..."
[FN29] "There's only one question you should ask yourself: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk?" Dirty Harry (Warner Brothers 1971).
Text: "Defendant Reid explained that distributors expect [FN32]..."
[FN32] James Bond: "Do you expect me to talk?" Goldfinger: "No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die." Goldfinger (GB United Artists 1961).
Seriously, of the 55 footnotes in this opinion, 28 of them are movie quotes. I highly recommend it to all of you. 2000 WL 264295 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).
Awesome.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I don't know that I've ever known "Defendant's ask this court" to require citation. I'm glad, if one was needed for some reason, it at least was to a movie...
Hysterical. I like that they call Emma an "allegedly popular film." My favorite case quote I've encountered so far relates to an underwear-selling pyramid scheme: "We find no flaw in the mathematics or the extrapolation and agree that the prospect of a quarter of a billion brassiere and girdle hawkers is not only impossible but frightening to contemplate, particularly since it is in excess of the present population of the Nation, only about half of whom hopefully are prospective lingerie consumers. However, we live in a real world and not fantasyland." That is to say, everyone is a prospective lingerie consumer.
My favorite footnote is as follows: "The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called her a 'snitch bitch hoe.' A hoe, of course, is a tool used for weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden's response. We have taken the liberty of changing 'hoe' to 'ho,' a staple of rap music vernacular, as, for example, when Ludacris raps "You doin' ho activities with ho tendencies.'"
Post a Comment