Alex Long, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, has researched the prevalence of quotations from popular song lyrics in legal opinions and briefs. What was originally a hobbyist’s casual diversion became a painstaking obsession; he apparently did a tabulation of the entire body of legal literature  for a single year, 2007.

Bob Dylan was the most quoted lyricist by a landslide and, although considered to be left-leaning, attracted citations from both sides of the political spectrum, including  Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Roberts. The most used Dylan lyric is, of course, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Can you guess , as Robert Siegel of NPR’s All Things Considered found easy to do in interviewing the professor, which Rolling Stones lyrics is the most cited line from that band?

I was happy to hear that Long had  heard from a San Francisco
lawyer who tries to incorporate Grateful Dead lyrics into his legal
opinions. I suppose the most a propos would be, “Well, I ain’t often right but I’ve never been wrong. (Seldom works out the way it does in the
song…)” I wonder, in contrast to legal writings, how often one might
find quoted song lyrics in the medical literature or in particular that of my own field, psychiatry. I may just have to look into that if I have any free time… (via NPR).