Excellent Dicta!

As the name of our blog implies, we are obsessed with dicta. Earlier this term, the Supreme Court handed down Sprint v. APCC Services. All you need to know about this case is what the New York Times wrote: "Four pages into his dissent on Monday in an achingly boring dispute between pay phone companies and long distance carriers, John G. Roberts Jr., the chief justice of the United States, put a song lyric where the citation to precedent usually goes."

The payphone operators assigned their claims to respondents “for purposes of collection,” App. to Pet. for Cert. 114a; respondents never had any share in the amount collected. 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).

Supreme Dicta has no problem with citing Bob Dylan in an appellate court decision. In fact, we encourage it. But this citation does present a problem with using original intent as an interpretive method.

I was always under the impression that the lyric read: "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose." A Google search for that version of the lyric yields 1,800 hits. And this You Tube clip of Dylan singing the song in 1966 shows him using the word ain't (at the 5:50 mark):

So why was the lyric cited incorrectly? Probably because on Dylan's own website lists the lyric without the word "ain't."

So anyone who thinks that determining the framer's intent is easy, think again. Bob Dylan is the ONLY framer for this song, and even HE is saying contradictory things.

So to summarize this post...Scalia can bite me. Thomas too...actually I'm afraid either one might give me rabies.