Trial lawyers don’t like being surprised in court, but one day recently it was my turn to be surprised. An opposing counsel filed a response to my motion the morning of our hearing, and as I hastily glanced at the document I noticed something unusual: He had quoted a couple of lines from a Bruce Springsteen song in order to illustrate his main point. It’s not the fact “the Boss” was quoted that threw me. What surprised me was that the other lawyer quoted Springsteen—not me, somebody who was born and raised in New Jersey, who had driven the same highways, visited the same Jersey Shore dive bars where the Boss got his start, and sung along with thousands of others watching Bruce and the E Street Band perform “Born to Run,” “Badlands,” and other classics in marathon concerts.
Perhaps I shouldn’t feel so bad, because clearly you don’t have to be from New Jersey to identify with Bruce Springsteen’s perspective on the American experience. Law professor Alex Long wrote a 2007 law review article about popular music lyrics in legal filings, and he concluded that Springsteen was the third most-cited artist in history, behind only Bob Dylan (no. 1) and the Beatles (no. 2). The Boss’s body of work has been the subject of college courses and CLE seminars, and in 2005 Widener University Law School in Pennsylvania even hosted a symposium devoted to Springsteen’s impact on the law.
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