Courtesy the Macomb Daily – a lawsuit brought by a childhood bully named in one of Eminem’s songs against the rap star has been dismissed.
Normally, I wouldn’t care one way or another, being barely aware that there exists an artist named “Eminem” in the first place. But judge Deborah Servitto dismissed the case in an unsual way: with a 10-stanza rap. Dorky? Yes, but it beats the usual legal prose, right?
You decide. Here is the judge’s ruling (note to mods – it’s part of a legal opinion, it’s in the public domain; no copyright issues here):
I think it would be hi-LAR-ious if Enimem set it to a beat, threw in some “motherfuckers,” and stuck it on the new album. The Honorable Justice would have to donate her cut of the profits to some charity or something, wouldn’t she?
This actually wasn’t her entire opinion. She wrote a serious, non-rap ruling and just atached this to the end. I’d be more than a little miffed if I was involved in a case and the judge gave out a signal like this that she wasn’t taking it very seriously.
Did she pull out a ghetto blaster to perform this? I keep picturing that episode of Cheers where Sam got a job as a sportscaster and delivered a terrible ‘rap’ to seem hip to the younger audience.
She isn’t the first public official to fancy herself a rapper.
All else aside, President Nixon was a True American Original, and he admittedhere that if there had been a good rap group in his hometown while he was growing up, he would have liked to have pursued that instead of a career in politics.
The possible results of which were discussed here.
If you take a look at Mr. Mathers’ lyrics on the page, they scan like shit too, but he manages to fit them together…which is why I believe the man does indeed have skillz.
Good Lord, preserve us from that most dissolute of creatures, the judicial humorist.
The Court did give up on the second couplet in this stanza:
Eminem says Bailey used to throw him around
Beat him up in the john, shoved his face in the ground
Eminem contends that his rap is protected
By the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment
There is a much abused tradition of literary open pit mining in judicial decisions. There is a locally famous Iowa case about the authority of agents in which a car salesman lost his employer’s bank roll in an after hours poker game. The money was to be used to buy cars. The employer wanted his money back from the other guys in the card game. The State Supreme Court’s opinion starts off with a bow to Robert Service and this language: “Some of the boys were whooping it up in the Old Fort Des Moines Hotel.”
Years ago I had a case about a defective manure storage structure in which the trial judge entered a decision in verse. My opponent had a major fit and tried to have the decision reversed because of the trial court’s flippant attitude.
There is a federal district judge in Oklahoma, Wayne Alley, who has a knack for the language, too.
