Thursday, September 27, 2007

Best dissenting opinion of all time

Recently in wills and trusts, we read a dissenting opinion of Justice Michael Musmanno, an amazing writer and quite possibly the only justice in American history who has dissented more frequently than Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Here's what Musmanno had to say about the obscenity of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer":

"'Cancer' is not a book. It is a cesspool, and open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity. And in the center of all this waste and stench, besmearing himself with its foulest defilement, splashes, leaps, cavorts and wallows a bifurcated specimen that responds to the name of Henry Miller. One wonders how the human species could have produced so lecherous, blasphemous, disgusting and amoral a human being as Henry Miller. One wonders why he is received in polite society. . . . From Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, from Dan to Beersheba, and from the ramparts of the Bible to Samuel Eliot Morison's Oxford History of the American People, I dissent." Commonwealth v. Robin, 218 A.2d 546, 561 (Pa. 1966).

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