Movie Quote of the Day (‘My Little Chickadee,’ With Mae West’s View of the Law)

Judge [played by Addison Richards]: “Are you trying to show contempt for this court?”

Flower Belle Lee [played by Mae West]: “No... I'm doin' my best to hide it! “— My Little Chickadee (1940), screenplay by Mae West and W.C. Fields, directed by Edward F. Cline

Quote of the Day (Alexis de Tocqueville, on Political Questions Decided in U.S. Courts)

“There is virtually no political question in the United States that does not sooner or later resolve itself into a judicial question. Hence the parties in their daily polemics find themselves obliged to borrow the ideas and language of the courts.”—French diplomat, political scientist, historian, and observer of America Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Democracy in America, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (1835)

As true as Tocqueville’s words were at the time he wrote them, they are even more valid today. Back in 1835, there were only 24 states in the Union whose claims needed to be adjudicated, not 50; the U.S. was still a rural (not industrial, let alone post-industrial) society with comparatively few complications; the New Deal had not established the executive branch as having inescapable responsibility for the economy, with complex legislation and regulatory agencies to boot; and the U.S. Supreme Court had only exercised once, in Marbury v. Madison, its power of judicial review to declare legislation unconstitutional.

None of those conditions obtain today. The latest example of this reliance on courts is the abortion issue, but it is not the only example. The battle over President Trump’s multiple scandals has led to divisions between the Democratic-dominated House of Representatives and the GOP-controlled Senate, producing an inevitable face-off in the courts. More such legal struggles are sure to follow.

The effectiveness of all this grappling remains to be seen. Liberals point to the Supreme Court’s role in initiating the end of Jim Crow in the South with Brown v. the Board of Topeka, Kansas, but the success of the civil-rights movement depended crucially on securing broad public support that quickly manifested itself in countless bits of legislation.

But not all political struggles are capable of being decided, or even influenced, by the courts. For decades after Judge Arthur Garrity ordered busing to root out de facto segregation of Boston’s public schools in the 1970s, the stark black-and-white divisions evident in classrooms then only worsened. 

And, as Andrew Sullivan noted in a recent New York Magazine article, while the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage has led to a decided shift in public opinion and state laws throughout the nation, the abortion debate remains frozen 46 years after Roe v. Wade. As the events of this past week showed, both sides have merely dug in their heels.

(I took the accompanying photo of the Supreme Court back in November 2015, when I was on vacation in Washington, D.C.)

Quote of the Day (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., on Experience as ‘The Life of the Law’)

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.”—Associate Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935), The Common Law (1881)

Song Lyric of the Day (W.S. Gilbert, on the Rise of an English ‘Learned Judge’)

“At Westminster Hall I danced a dance,

    Like a semi-despondent fury;

For I thought I never should hit on a chance

    Of addressing a British Jury—

But I soon got tired of third-class journeys,

    And dinners of bread and water;

So I fell in love with a rich attorney's

    Elderly, ugly daughter….

“The rich attorney, he jumped with joy,

    And replied to my fond professions:

‘You shall reap the rewards of your pluck, my boy,

    At the Bailey and Middlesex sessions.

You'll soon get used to her looks,’ said he,

    ‘And a very nice girl you will find her!

 She may very well pass for forty-three

    In the dusk, with a light behind her!’"—English lyricist W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911), “When I, Good Friends, Was Called to the Bar,” in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Trial by Jury (1875)

(The image accompanying this post shows Frederic Sullivan, brother of Gilbert’s songwriting partner Arthur Sullivan, in the role of the “Learned Judge” in the original production of Trial by Jury.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Animal House,’ With the Clarence Darrow of Delta House)

(At the Student Court involving Delta House, Dean Wormer has made abundantly clear that the disciplinary proceedings will be stacked against the fraternity. The defense could only be taken on by an attorney for the damned, like Clarence Darrow—that, or…)

Otter (played by Tim Matheson) (leaping to his feet): “Point of parliamentary procedure!”

Hoover (played by James Widdoes) (whispering to Otter): “Don't screw around, they're serious this time!

Otter (to Hoover): “Take it easy, I'm pre-law.”

Boon (played by Peter Riegert) (to Otter): “I thought you were pre-med.”

Otter (to Boon): “What's the difference?”

[Addressing the room]

Otter: “Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests - we did.”

[Winks at Dean Wormer—whose wife he has just seduced.]

Otter: “But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!”

[Leads the Deltas out of the hearing, all humming the Star-Spangled Banner]— Animal House (1978), screenplay by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney, and Chris Miller, directed by John Landis