The Supreme Court only hears about 1 percent of the roughly 8,000 cases submitted for review each term, and, as such, the court generally only takes up cases involving a legal question that circuit courts have differed on. But it probably indicates a lack of conflict among lower courts regarding the case's central questions. The Supreme Court's declining to hear the Knox case isn't an endorsement of the lower court's ruling, at least explicitly. (Dennis also signed the amicus brief filed on Knox's behalf.) "Courts frequently undervalue or completely dismiss the artistic aspects of the music, and its political and historical context." "That notion, whether for particular lyrics in a case or about hip-hop more broadly is one that we have heard from many judges, either expressly or impliedly," says Andrea Dennis, a law professor at the University of Georgia and co-author of the forthcoming Rap on Trial.
"It is satirical and political."īut, familiar or not, courts have a long history of criminalizing hip-hop, and of taking rap lyrics literally but not seriously as art. "Jamal Knox didn't intend to harm those officers any more than Watts intended to shoot LBJ millions of young rappers adopt the gangsta persona, this stage bravado that threatens all kinds of people, places, and things-but never intends to carry out those threats," says andre cummings, a law professor at the University of Arkansas–Little Rock and co-editor of Hip Hop and the Law. The blistering and thorough petition accuses the Pennsylvania courts of being "deeply unaware of popular music generally and rap music specifically." So do a group of prominent scholars and hip-hop artists-including Killer Mike, Chance the Rapper, 21 Savage, and Meek Mill-who signed onto a brief petitioning the Supreme Court to hear Knox's case. Knox and his attorneys disagree, arguing that his lyrics fall within his First Amendment right to artistic expression-and shouldn't be taken literally.
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In its 2018 opinion affirming the trial court's decision in the Knox case, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied the rapper any artistic imprimatur, declaring that his lyrics were real threats of violence because they supposedly did not include "political, social, or academic commentary, nor are they facially satirical or ironic." In Watts, the court found a draft protester's rallying cry that, were he ever inducted into the army, "the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ" to be political hyperbole: Within the context it was delivered, it was not a true threat and thus was protected speech. The legal concept at the center of the Knox case is what's known as the "true threat" doctrine, which has its origins in the 1969 Supreme Court ruling Watts v.