Turn down that boombox

I’m not quite sure why the Georgia Supreme Court would devote so much time and attention to this relatively minor litigation, but the justices handed down a 4-3 decision Monday that upheld Clarke County’s local noise ordinance that forced two UGA students to turn down the volume on their music.

The complainants in this case, students Robert Manlove and William Hoffman, sued the Athens-Clarke government last year on the grounds that the noise ordinance excessively restricted the volume of music they could play and applied a uniform regulation throughout Clarke County. This local statute, they contended, ignored the “pulsing downtown area serving as the heart of Athens’ famous music and entertainment scene” and mandated the same level of quiet on “fraternity row” as in a “serene single-family subdivision.”

As someone who wore out his hi-fi playing Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath during his college days, I can empathize with them. Of course, empathy is something that judges aren’t supposed to display these days, and a majority of the justices showed no empathy for the students. They ruled in favor of the noise law.

Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, on the other hand, wrote a fiery, 15-page dissent taking issue with her colleagues. “Not only is the majority wrong in this case, but the precedent it sets today bodes ill for the future for those who believe that the courts must remain ever vigilant against government attempts to control, and ultimately suppress, the right of the people to speak freely,” Sears wrote. “The majority opinion fails to appreciate that music equals speech in the First Amendment context . . . Music is inherently expressive, and it receives the full protection of the First Amendment, even if it has no lyrics.”

I don’t know if our future freedoms depend upon the granting of full First Amendment protection to the Cramps singing “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns,” but the judge’s point is well-taken. She noted that it will probably be one of the last major decisions she writes before retiring from the bench in a couple of weeks.

“There are only a few times in any person’s life when someone walks into your life and you realize that you have been touched by a miracle,” she wrote in a special footnote. “I have been lucky.”