(Bloomberg) — It’s not every day the US Supreme Court is graced with a brief from a party describing itself as “the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.” But that’s what the justices received Monday, with the docketing of an atypical friend-of-court brief from parody website The Onion.
The brief is laced with dramatic hyperbole, jabs at the self-seriousness of the legal profession, and outlandish, obviously false declarations of fact. Filing a parody brief was of course the point, the site’s lawyers explained, as they threw their support behind an Ohio man arrested for publishing a Facebook page making fun of his local police department.
“The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks,” the site’s lawyer Stephen van Stempvoort wrote.
www.yahoo.com/now/onion-filed-brief-supreme-court-205748242.html