Brooklyn Law School BrooklynWorks Faculty Scholarship Summer 2004 Taking Pop-Ups Seriously: The urJ isprudence of the Infield lF y Rule Neil B. Cohen Brooklyn Law School,
[email protected] S. W. Waller Follow this and additional works at: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/faculty Part of the Common Law Commons, Other Law Commons, and the Rule of Law Commons Recommended Citation 82 Wash. U. L. Q. 453 (2004) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by BrooklynWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of BrooklynWorks. TAKING POP-UPS SERIOUSLY: THE JURISPRUDENCE OF THE INFIELD FLY RULE NEIL B. COHEN* SPENCER WEBER WALLER** In 1975, the University of Pennsylvania published a remarkable item. Rather than being deemed an article, note, or comment, it was classified as an "Aside." The item was of course, The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule.' This piece of legal scholarship was remarkable in numerous ways. First, it was published anonymously and the author's identity was not known publicly for decades. 2 Second, it was genuinely funny, perhaps one of the funniest pieces of true scholarship in a field dominated mostly by turgid prose and ineffective attempts at humor by way of cutesy titles or bad puns. Third, it was short and to the point' in a field in which a reader new to law reviews would assume that authors are paid by the word or footnote. Fourth, the article was learned and actually about something-how baseball's infield fly rule4 is consistent with, and an example of, the common law processes of rule creation and legal reasoning in the Anglo-American tradition.