Street Legal

Tangled Up in Law: The Jurisprudence of Bob Dylan

Prof. Michael L. Perlin

New York Law School



Electronic copy available


If all you knew of Bob Dylan’s law-related work was Absolutely Sweet Marie (“to live outside the law/you must be honest”) or Ballad of a Thin Man (“with great lawyers/you have discussed lepers and crooks”), you might think that Dylan had little use for the law or the legal system. And you would be wrong. Putting aside Dylan’s robust career as a litigator (as a plaintiff [to stop the production of bootlegs], as a defendant [in the Hurricane-spawned Patti Valentine litigation]) or as a witness before Congressional committees examining copyright legislation, a careful examination of Dylan’s lyrics reveals a writer - OK, let's say it: a scholar - with a well-developed jurisprudence, ranging over a broad array of topics that relate to civil and criminal law, public and private law.
Dylan’s lyrics reflect the work of a thinker who takes “the law” seriously in multiple iterations - the role of lawyers, the role of judges, the disparities between the ways the law treats the rich and the poor, the inequality of the criminal and civil justice systems, the corruption of government, the police, and the judiciary, and more. Of course, there is no question that may of Bob’s lyrics are, to be, charitable “obscure” (the frequent use of the word “mystical” in lyrical analyses seems to be a code word for obscurity). And Bob being Bob, we’ll never know exactly what means what. But, even in this context, many of his songs about law are “crying [out to us] like a fire in the sun.”

To be published in Fordham Urban Law Journal
June 21, 2011



Street-Legal (1978)