Chief Justice Roberts and noir, it’s a bad genre
Chief Justice John Roberts is enjoying a ton of favorable publicity today for his channeling of Raymond Chandler in the first two paragraphs of a dissent yesterday from a Supreme Court decision not to review a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in Pennsylvania v. Dunlap:
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.
While we’ve long been fans of the Chief’s writing flair, Roberts’ opinion is entirely predictable. He’s a law and order conservative who wants the courts to get out of the business of second-guessing the decisions made by police officers. Roberts argues that the police have “probable cause” under the Fourth Amendment to make an arrest whenever they see a “hand-to-hand” transaction in a high-crime area and asserts that “the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision will make it more difficult for the police to conduct drug interdiction in high-crime areas, unless they employ the riskier practice of having undercover officers actually make a purchase or sale of drugs.”
Like in his Sprint v. APCC Services opinion last term, where Roberts cited Bob Dylan in support of a strained argument for limiting access to courts, Roberts is using rhetorical flourish to make the conservative goals of limiting constitutional protections and court access seem “cool.” Count us as unmoved.
Comments
Comment from jerry
Time: October 16, 2008, 12:29 pm
As an attorney of 35 years it’s refreshing to read a ‘plain english’ opinion. If all judges follow Robert’s style we wouldn’t have to read an opinion a dozen times to make it understandable. Most judges are of superior intellect but they shouldn’t flaunt it with stilted writing and a ‘nose in the air’.
Comment from eas
Time: October 16, 2008, 1:42 pm
CJ Roberts, Jr., should bear in mind that cases decided by the Supreme Court have been through a very complex and rigorous pre-screening eliminating process. If a case made it through the refining legal hurdles of the High Court, it is a given that the case proved to qualify as “necessary” to determine a “split” within jurisdictions and to maintain “uniformity” between them, or, because the case presents a question of national great importance.
I think that the judiciary would be much better served if the Supreme Court and its Justices confined themselves to deciding important cases, not instead on “how” the opinions of the cases that have been decided are “delivered”.
Therefore, my message to CJ Roberts, Jr., is–
Your creative mind as an inventive noir writer gets high approval.
The unavoidable result however is that–
“it belittles the losing party’s arguments and cheapens the opinion making process”.
Comment from Daniel
Time: November 1, 2008, 2:43 am
“Roberts is using rhetorical flourish to make the conservative goals of limiting constitutional protections and court access seem “cool.” Count us as unmoved.”
Limiting Constitutional protection, or making certain unelected judges don’t interfere unduly in legislation enacted by democratically elected official?
Democracy is “cool”. Count me as moved.
Comment from Sean
Time: January 23, 2009, 6:10 pm
Loved it. being the cop he is talking about what a cool way to be linked in history !
Comment from JohnLopresti
Time: February 6, 2009, 5:04 pm
Roberts’ flourish is an invitation for an epistemological repartee to broaden his scope. In the Zimmerman cite, he misinterpreted the couplet on its face, and submerged the 2/3 of the text which was Zimmerman’s real message which, in fact, was a plea against the very sort of exclusionist rhetoric which is the CJ’s forte. Nothing but the facts, ma’am.
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