bob dylan, constitutional law consultant

In a recent dissenting opinion on a rather torpor-inducing Supreme Court case (the subject matter, I believe, was pay phones and long-distance calls), Chief Justice John Roberts, spurning the tradition of citing previous cases as precedent, wrote instead:

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. “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).

Dylan tops the list of popular musicians cited in judicial opinions with 26 hits; next is Paul Simon with 8 (or, when combined with Simon & Garfunkel, 12), followed by Bruce Springsteen with 5. William Rehnquist, Roberts’s predecessor, was given to the citation of Gilbert & Sullivan, but Roberts’s citation marks the first use of popular rock lyrics to support a Supreme Court opinion.

See the NY Times piece on the citation here.

scalia’s dissent

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past 48 hours or so, you might not know that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have the legal right to appeal their detention as enemy combatants in U.S. civilian courts. This is a huge deal; it renders the whole point of Gitmo utterly moot. If being somewhere outside of U.S. soil doesn’t exempt detainees from U.S. legal rights, who cares about having a special place outside the U.S. to hold them?

One of the Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia, wrote a dissenting opinion that the New York Times characterized as “apocalyptic”, predicting increased American casualties as a direct result of the Court’s ruling. His reasoning is as follows: previous cases have existed in which the military released detainees who were being held at Guantanamo due to lack of evidence that they were enemy combatants, and they have subsequently proven unequivocally that they were, becoming involved in terrorist activities and killing Americans. If the military didn’t have enough evidence to keep enemy combatants under lock, then how on earth can they prove detainees’ enemy combatant status to America’s civilian courts?

I have to say, I find it interesting that Scalia, as a member of the highest court in the land, seems out to stifle the judicial system itself. If the correct and legal processes that exist in America are not capable of handling all of America’s activities, is the solution to simply suspend the correct and legal processes?

The full text of the court’s decision is available here.