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cocks on stage, both intervene in these practices and are themselves in ongoing transition, as I imagine this would not be prohibited today—even if Eminem attempted it. Law must be viewed within the conditions of the social practice at hand and cannot be viewed apart from them as if standing above and outside of them. Dewey articulated a consequentialist and pragmatic standard for determining what law is. What we think of as the judge applying the rule is not an act that happens after the rule is passed as a legislated statute, but instead, his judgment is a necessary part of the law. A judicial determination contains a living consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of policy, the costs and public attitude concerning the enforcement of the decision, and has the possibility of serving as a precedent for future legal cases.

The judgment is so necessary a part that we can often figure out what the law is by describing judicial behavior (“My Philosophy of Law,” in Later Works, Volume 14, pp. 117–18). It is an empty prospect to discuss what the law is apart from what the judge does. So what was the law in Arkansas? That is, what can we learn about law by looking at the judge’s behavior in Richards’s case?

Judge Richards Presides

The cops in Arkansas needed probable cause to search the trunk, and they manufactured this by saying that they saw marijuana smoke bellowing from the windows of the car. Richards’s attorney, Bill Carter, himself an Arkansas native, insisted that it was impossible for Richards and his friends to light up and fill the car with smoke in the twenty yards they drove before being pulled over.

With a large crowd of media and fans gathering outside the courthouse, the ensuing “trial” turned into a comedy. The judge they eventually recruited to hear the case had been playing golf all day and was drunk. (Did I mention indeterminacy in the law and in judicial behavior?) He even left the court in recess to walk across the street to buy a pint of bourbon which he hid poorly in his sock and sipped from while he listened to the angry arresting officer demand Richards’s conviction and threaten to arrest the judge for being drunk on the bench.

The young, idealistic prosecuting attorney insisted they release Richards and his friends because the court lacked justification for holding them. Eventually the judge interrupted the proceeding in order to take an interview with the BBC, in which he praised the golf courses in England, and announced a press conference “with the boys” to “explain some of the proceedings here, how the Rolling Stones came to be in our town here an’ all.” Eventually the judge’s brother took him aside and said, “Tom, we need to confer. There is no legal cause to hold them. We will have all hell to pay if we don’t follow the law here” (Life, p. 17). Holmes was right. The law is prediction through and through. At every level, from the bad man to the judge, the law is just the prediction of the consequences of its transgression.

Richards conducted the press conference promised by the judge from the bench and was filmed pounding the gavel and announcing to the press, “Case closed.”

The bad man, Richards, reflected on the indeterminacy at work in the case:

It was a classic outcome for the Stones. The choice always was a tricky one for the authorities who arrested us. Do you want to lock them up, or have your photograph taken with them and give them a motorcade to see them on their way? There’s votes either way. In Fordyce, by the skin or our teeth, we got the motorcade. The state police had to escort us through the crowds to the airport at around two in the morning, where our airplane, well stocked with Jack Daniel’s was revved up and waiting. (Life, p. 18)

Reflecting on Keith Richards’s arrest serves as an index to a philosophical reflection on the “sin” of rock’n’roll and on the way law embodies a history of attitudes and social practices surrounding that sin. The original sin of rock’n’roll also helps me see why my neighbor’s mom thought rock was the devil’s music. She didn