There aren’t many legal decisions that also discuss jazz music, especially in an entertaining way, but via The Party of the First Part I learned of a very amusing dissent in a 1956 Pennsylvania Supreme Court case about taxing jukeboxes: Fierro v. City of Wlliamsport, 120 A.2d 889 (Pa. 1956). Give me a second for the context, and then I’ll get to the dissent.
The state of Pennsylvania had passed a law limiting the power of municipalities to impose taxes; one allowance was that municipalities could impose taxes on “sales of admission to places of amusement.” The town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania responded with a 10% tax “upon sales of admission to amusements” in the town; the ordinance stated that “‘amusement’ shall mean all manner and form or entertainment within the City of Williamsport, Pa., including among others, the following: juke boxes, pinball machines, and any other form of mechanical and/or electronic device for which admission is charged or paid.”
Fierro ran a bar featuring a jukebox filled exclusively with jazz records. Admission to the bar was free, but you had to feed coins into the jukebox for it to play songs. The town tried to levy the tax against Fierro’s jukebox income, and he responded that he didn’t have to pay because this was not a tax on a “admission to a place of amusement.” The town responded that the “amusement” was the jukebox not the bar, and the “admission” to the jukebox was the coin used to play the jukebox. All but one of the Justices agreed with the town, and the court held that Fierro had to pay the tax.
All except Justice Musmanno, who penned an amusing dissent:
I do not believe it is necessary to cite legal authority, if indeed any could be found on so obvious a matter, that a juke box is not a place of amusement. A place of amusement obviously denotes and connotes an establishment, indoors or outdoors, into which a human being enters for the purpose of amusement. It may be a building, it may be an enclosure, it may be a race track, but in every instance the introduction of a human body is contemplated and provided for.
A juke box is not a structure into which a person can enter. It is not an enclosure. In the eyes and ears of many people, including the writer of this opinion, a juke box confined to ‘jazz’ records may be a nuisance. It robs the air of sweet silence, it substitutes for the gentle concord of stillness the wailings of the so-called ‘blues singer,’ the whinings of foggy saxophones, the screeching of untuned fiddles, the blasts of head-splitting horns, and the battering of earshattering drums. It makes a mockery of music, it replaces harmony with cacophony, tonality with discord, and peace with annoyance. If the purpose of the City Council of Williamsport was to tax the juke box out of existence as a nuisance and an enemy to the general welfare of its population, it certainly had the authority under general police power to do that, but it could not, merely as a means of raising revenue, play havoc with the English language.
(emphasis and paragraph break added)