Last year Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. won praise for quoting Bob Dylan in an opinion (a dissent, actually, in Spring Communications Co. v. APCC Services.) Not to be outdone, apparently, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. Wednesday quoted at length from John Lennon.
It came in Alito’s major ruling in Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summum, which redefined monuments placed on public land — such as a Ten Commandments monument — as a form of government speech, rather than private speech that can run afoul of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Some briefs had argued that if a memorial was to be regarded as a message conveyed by government, the government ought to be forced to embrace the message through a formal resolution.
