State Judges, Television

This Judicial Citation To 'Cheers' Will Make Your Day

It's always nice to see a judicial opinion with a little flair.

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Cheers_intro_logoHere at Above the Law, we are suckers for judicial citations to pop culture. Curmudgeons might find these shoutouts to be twee or trying too hard, but we’ve rarely met a pop culture cite we didn’t like.

Judicial opinions can be dense and dry, so anything that lightens them up is a good thing. In these pages, we have approvingly mentioned citations to everything from Spiderman to The Thing to The Big Lebowski.

And let’s not limit ourselves to movies. These days, some of the best filmed entertainment can be found on television.

Today’s treat comes to us from Judge Stephen Dillard of the Court of Appeals of Georgia (and also Twitter; Justice Don Willett isn’t the only tweeting jurist). Here’s the paragraph in question (gavel bang: Raffi Melkonian aka @RMFifthCircuit):

[O]ur concern is with the actual text used in Davis’s pardon, not unattributable statements or pronouncements contained on one or more websites (even if one of those websites does belong to the Board). If legislative history is “the equivalent of entering a crowded cocktail party and looking over the heads of the guests for one’s friends,”40 then using unattributable language on a website to inform the meaning of a statute, regulation, or pardon is the equivalent of leaving the cocktail party altogether, driving past establishments not to your liking, and going straight to the pub “where everybody knows your name”41 and they always tell you what you want to hear. If the former is cherry picking, then the latter is an endless orchard full of interpretive possibilities.

“[A]n endless orchard full of interpretive possibilities”: props to Judge Dillard for the rhetorical flair. And props to him, or his law clerks, for footnote 41:

41 GARY PORTNOY, Where Everybody Knows Your Name, theme from Cheers (Charles Burrows/Charles Productions & Paramount Network Television, 1982-93).

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Because if you’re going to cite the Cheers theme song, do it right.

P.S. Yes, all you gunners and Bluebook nerds out there, we noticed it too: in the opinion, “GARY PORTNOY” looks like it’s in all caps rather than small caps. But this is a judicial opinion, not a law review article, and courts enjoy great discretion in terms of typography — so we’ll give it a pass.

Davis v. The State [Court of Appeals of Georgia]

Earlier: Federal Judge Uses Pop Culture In Pithy Dissent
Texas Supreme Court Approvingly Cites Movie About Pot-Smoking And Porn
Justice Kagan Cites Precedential Authority Of Comic Book

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DBL square headshotDavid Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.

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