Courts get bored, too

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.

So begins Chief Justice Roberts' dissent in Pennsylvania v. Dunlap, 129 S. Ct. 448, 172 L. Ed. 2d 321 (2008).

The courts are not as humorless as some legal writers might suppose.  Take, for example, a footnote in a 5th Circuit opinion in Easter Seal Society for Crippled Children v. Playboy Enterprises, 815 F.2d 323 (5th Cir. 1987). See footnotes on p. 325.

Thus, this most delightful of case names: Easter Seal Society for Crippled Children v. Playboy Enterprises; seriously rivaled, in our judgment, only by United States v. 11 1/4 Dozen Packages of Article Labeled in Part Mrs. Moffat's Shoo Fly Powders for Drunkenness.  

Another case in point is In re United States Brass Corp., No. 96-2952 (7th Cir. 1997). The esteemed Judge Posner, the finest judicial mind of this century, is famous for his wry comments and well-written, common-sense, yet scholarly opinions. The government should name a major continent, or at least an ocean, after him.

This case involved several consolidated bankruptcies of affiliated corporations who, Judge Posner noted, had been sued for the "Qest System," the judge noting that it was "a plumbing system that turned out to be defective (which goes to prove that if you can't spell, you're liable to make other mistakes as well)."

Yet another example may be seen in Smith v. Colonial Penn Insurance Co., 943 F. Supp. 782 (S.D. Tex. 1996). The request for a change of venue was centered around the fact that Galveston does not have a commercial airport into which Defendant's representatives may fly and "out of which they may be expediently whisked to the federal courthouse in Galveston. Rather, Defendant contends that it will be faced with the huge 'inconvenience' of flying into Houston and driving less than forty miles to the Galveston courthouse, an act that will 'encumber' it with 'unnecessary driving time and expenses.'" The Court refused to move the location of the trial, since the Texas federal courthouse "got lights, indoor plummin', 'lectric doors, and all sorts of new stuff, almost like them big courthouses back East." The Court said, "it is not this Court's concern how Plaintiff gets here, whether it be by plane, train, automobile, horseback, foot, or on the back of a huge Texas jackrabbit, as long as Plaintiff is here at the proper date and time." The Court pointed out that traveling to the federal courthouse in Galveston does not involve a trip by covered wagon.

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