5 rock songs quoted by the Supreme Court | Constitution Daily

Folk music has long been a vehicle of social protest.  Irish partisans pushing for home rule, American revolutionaries denouncing George III, enslaved African Americans yearning for freedom, factory workers demanding the right to organize, coal miners denouncing the "company store," Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie condemning bankers and industrialists….  The list goes on.  Long before the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the twentieth century, the power of music was formidable.
 
The power of song has so pervaded our society that now it seems that even Supreme Court justices quote lines from protest songs in their decisions.  In 2008, Chief Justice Roberts (loosely) quoted Bob Dylan when he wrote "when you got nothing you got nothing to lose" in one decision, and more recently Justice Scalia quoted Dylan's the "times they are a-changing" in a 2010 decision.
 
In fact, Dylan especially, as well as many other songwriters, have often been quoted in court cases by judges, attorneys, and prosecutors.  Perhaps court officials feel an affinity for protest music because the songs tend to be rather judgmental (from Joe Hill's "The Preacher and the Slave Girl" to Bob Dylan's "Hurricane," from Woody Guthrie's "Deportee" to Neil Young's "Ohio," from Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" to The Doors' "The Unknown Soldier").
 
http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/protest-music-at-the-supreme-court/