Funny things I read in law school

From time to time in my mountain of law school reading that I do EVERY DAY, I come across something amusing. Most of the time it is found in a footnote that most students may overlook in their haste to finish the assignment and move on to something else. This is one that definitely bears repeating.I was nearly done with my reading for Wills, Trusts, & Estates (the second to the last case) and I came across this footnote for the justice who wrote the dissenting opinion:

"Justice Musmanno was a striking individualist, sometimes injudicious, always colorful. In dissenting from a majority holding that Henry Miller's Rabelasian Tropic of Cancer was not obscene, Musmanno wrote:

'Cancer is not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrifaction, 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 Morrison's Oxford History of the American People, I dissent.'

I could only hope to be this articulate. Even though I do not wish upon myself all of the attributes of Mr. Justice Musmanno.