For those in a Halloween Legal Ethics mood, I will be presenting a special Halloween edition of Ethics Rock tomorrow at 9:00 am, for the New State Bar Association. The great Mike Messer will be singing my legal ethics parodies of pop songs with a Halloween flair. Here’s the parody of “The Monster Mash” (by Bobby Pickett) telling a version of the story all law students cover in their ethics classes, the famous “Dead Bodies Case,” from New York…”The Mobster’s Trash”:
Representing T. Soprano, late one night
He confessed to killing a famed playwright
A missing person and a fortune’s heir
“Want to see his body? I’ll show you where!”
[Chorus]
I saw his trash!
It was the mobster’s trash!
The mobster trash!
It was a body stash!
It was his trash!
The body’s throat had been slashed
And all for cash!
It was the mobster’s trash!
Tony found himself suspected of the murder but
There wasn’t any evidence that seemed clear-cut
The playwright’s daughter came to me and begged
Could I tell her I saw her Dad’s head crushed like an egg?
[Chorus]
In Tony’s trash?
It was the mobster’s trash!
I saw his trash!
Where her Dad’s corpse was stashed!
In Tony’s trash!
And his head had been bashed
And all for cash!
It was the mobster’s trash.
[Bridge]
***
Then Tony went to trial
I kept his secret all the while!
But under cross examination
Tony confessed and with a smile.
***
He said he killed the playwright and that he was glad
The guy owed lots of money, which made Tony mad
And worst of all, that playwright’s plays
Were derivative, self-indulgent and ran on for days!
[Chorus]
So he got trashed!
Thrown in the mobster’s trash!
I saw his trash!
Where bodies all got stashed
In Tony’s trash!
The playwright’s skull had been smashed
And all for cash!
It was the mobster’s trash.
After Tony spilled the beans I admitted to all
I had seen the dead playwright, but made the call
That I couldn’t let on that I had viewed the nightmare
And not just because I could end up there…
In the trash!
In the mobster’s trash!
With a gash
A fatal bloody gash
In Tony’s trash!
Cause my throat would be slashed
I’m not that rash
To risk the mobster’s trash
Well they charged me with not handling a body right
And my law practice dwindled, almost out of sight
As for all you reporters, I’ll answer your quiz
But don’t you dare ask where Jimmy Hoffa is!
Cause Jimmy’s ash!
In some mobster’s trash!
First he got smashed
Up like corn-beef hash
And he was trashed
Incinerated to ash
Yes he was trashed
They made him mobster trash.
1. This slippery slope leads right to the cancel bin for every jurist and politician of the 18th, 19th, and much of the 20th Century. Rutgers University Board of Governors approved a resolution October 6 to strip the name of Joseph P. Bradley from “Bradley Hall,” which houses two academic departments, a learning center, theater and campus post office.
Bradley, who graduated from Rutgers College in 1836, was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1870. In 1971, the Board of Governors approved naming the building after Bradley, but that was before the culture decided that any prominent figure who hadn’t anticipated 21st century race cant and women’s rights orthodoxy had to be a vile and evil person, unworthy of honor. Bradley’s discredited views were especially noxious to students who had the benefit of more than a century and half of history and debate as he expressed them in two opinions. In 1883, he declared the first two sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 “unconstitutional.”
The law would have outlawed discrimination against African Americans in restaurants, public transportation or other private establishments. Bradley argued, however, that such protections do not apply to private businesses, only the actions of state governments, arguing that to “deprive white people the right to choose their own company would be to introduce another kind of slavery.” In 1872, Bradley backed the Court’s decision in Bradwell v. Illinois, finding that the Illinois State Bar could deny a qualified woman a law license because she was a woman. Bradley argued that the right to practice law was not constitutionally protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. He also pointed to “the laws of nature,” arguing that women have a responsibility to care for their families, as the “timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.…The harmony, not to say identity, of interest and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband,” Bradley wrote.
Ethics Alarms 