Friday, January 21, 2011

Justices Being Funny

Ryan Malphurs, PhD, just published his article analyzing the role and prevalence of humor at the US Supreme Court. See http://commlawreview.org/Archives/CLRv10i2/The%20Function%20of%20Laughter%20at%20the%20U.S.%20Supreme%20Court%20CLR%20v10i2.pdf

Of course, there's the usual academic discourse required for all such articles, but I highly recommend skimming it for the quirky references and jokes made by the justices. As he tagged and analyzed the transcripts, it became apparent that Justice Scalia is the one making the vast majority of the jokes. As evidenced by one of my previous posts, I don't really care for Scalia's biting nature, but I will admit that some of his lines are pretty funny. One of the funniest bits was the repeated mistake by several attorneys in several cases of calling Justice Souter "Justice Ginsberg." One is a man, and one is a woman! Ha! Apparently Justice Souter was very gracious in all of the incidents of mistaken identity and gender. It's nice to know that even the justices can appreciate the humor in mistakes.

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