Legal Research

Google Has Fun With Judgments

By Simon Fodden

The Google Scholar Blog has pulled up a metric dozen “entertaining legal opinions” for our amusement — and, presumably, to remind everyone that Scholar makes many U.S. judgments available free. For example, there’s a reference to US v. Syufy Enterprises 903 F. 2d 659 (1990) which is said to contain the names of over 200 movies smuggled into the ordinary text.

(The blog helpfully provides a link to an article that marks up the titles in the judgment for you. Me, I think it’s interesting that in Syufy one of the judges is named Quackenbush, because that’s the name that Groucho Marx had originally chosen for his character of the doctor in A Day at the Races, only to change it to Hackenbush for fear of lawsuits from real Dr.s Quackenbush.)

Then there are a number of references to opinions all in verse — most of which seem to me not to scan, a requirement, I should think, of doggerel. There are recipes for chowder, harder boiled prose, and some screenwriting dialogue.

I’m certain that there are dozens of entertaining Canadian judgments in the databanks at CanLII. Funny thing is, though, that it’s hard to search for funny stuff. You more or less have to know about the gems to begin with (unless someone can show me, for instance, how to do a Boolean search for verse). So let’s have ‘em folks: as Wendy Reynolds said in a recent post, it’s the silly season: give us your cites.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 29, 2010 (boomark / email).