September 14, 2004

Judicial humor.

There's not a whole lot of humor to be found in Supreme Court cases, but sometimes you find a little witticism tucked away somewhere. I like this, in a dissenting opinion by Justice Jackson, in United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78 (1944), discussing what it would take to defraud someone with an assertion of a religious belief:
All schools of religious thought make enormous assumptions, generally on the basis of revelations authenticated by some sign or miracle. The appeal in such matters is to a very different plane of credulity than is invoked by representations of secular fact in commerce. Some who profess belief in the Bible read literally what others read as allegory or metaphor, as they read Aesop's fables. Religious symbolism is even used by some with the same mental reservations one has in teaching of Santa Claus or Uncle Sam or Easter bunnies or dispassionate judges.

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