Within a year, Goss, who teaches writing and cultural studies in Fordham’s School for Professional and Continuing Studies’ College at 60 program, had embarked on an immersive and impassioned academic journey through Dylan’s oeuvre.

The result is a recent volume of essays she has co-edited and contributed to,Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century (University Press of Mississippi, 2017). Goss said the collection considers the Nobel laureate’s releases since 2001 as a singular and exceptionally fertile phase in his more than five-decade songwriting career. The essays pay particular attention to the records “Love and Theft” (2001), Modern Times (2006), Together Through Life and Tempest (2012), as well as the film Masked and Anonymous (2003), co-written and co-starring Dylan.

“The later work has an inherent and inexhaustible value to it, not just in the shadow of the ‘60s stuff,” Goss said. Giving it its due, she said, is her “great crusade.”

“The gravitas, the strangeness, and the innovation of his later work is what, to me, is a greatness that I want addressed,” said Goss.

Dylan, Kierkegaard, and Shakespeare

She and her co-editor, Eric Hoffman, a poet and essayist who conceived the book’s focus, had no trouble enlisting contributors, she said. Among the 11 essay subjects are an American scholar’s juxtaposition of Dylan and the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard; a fresh look by an Italian film studies scholar at Masked and Anonymous; and an exploration of the connections between Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Dylan’s similarly titled release.

Goss’ own contributed essay uses “Love and Theft” and Modern Times to illustrate Dylan’s significance independent of his early work.

She said the book’s variety of approaches to Dylan—in this case his more recent work—is “exemplary” of how writers, be they soberly academic or on the nonsensical fringe, have engaged with him.

“Each one of the writers in the book is writing so energetically and vigorously and closely from their context, their interest and their background,” said Goss, who also co-edited Dylan at Play (2011) and founded the Dylan studies journal Montague Street. “And each one unfolds a different vision and a different context for Dylan’s work.”

The so-called “Millennial Dylan,” Goss said, is robust and restless, fervent and fecund.

“I want him to enter that world of artists . . . whose consciousness of themselves and their relation to the world is as fine-grained in age as it was in youth,” she said. “And that’s something he has to teach us.”

–Rich Khavkine

“Some of my colleagues have been skeptical, but it also struck a chord in a lot of lawyers and judges,” said Green on April 4 at the opening of the event. “I was gratified to get calls and emails telling me how cool some thought this was.”

Singer Pete Kennedy (left) chats with Corny O’Connell (center) and David Hajdu at Dylan and the Law. Photos by Janet Sassi

The conference, which attracted judges, law professors and practicing lawyers, kicked off with a panel discussion led by WFUV disc jockey Corny O’Connell (LAW ’91) followed by a performance of Dylan’s songs by musician Pete Kennedy.

Citing the work of Michael Perlin, a lawyer who said that Dylan’s lyrics express cynicism for legal institutions and distaste of arbitrary sentencing, O’Connell asked panelists whether a “jurisprudence of Dylan” really exists.

“If there is such a jurisprudence, then Michael (Perlin) got it right—it is Dylan’s cynicism about the law and its institutions,” said Alex Long, professor of law at the University of Tennessee.

“The (1960s) folk music was a challenge to government jurisdiction, a challenge to the laws of the land based on the idea that outcast people, marginalized people, disenfranchised people, African Americans, the poor, people connected to the earth, all had a connection to a higher jurisdiction and a deeper truth,” Hajdu said. “It wasn’t actually a rejection of the law or even a challenge. It was a claim to privilege, a subscribing to a higher jurisdiction.”

Singer Pete Kennedy closed the evening with Dylan songs.

In his role as outsider troubadour, Dylan used his songs such as 1963’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and 1975’s “Hurricane” as both social commentary and protest against judicial decisions, said Abbe Smith, professor of history at Georgetown Law School. “Hurricane” inspired an outcry for a new trial for boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who was eventually exonerated of homicide charges for which he served 18 years.

Smith said that “Hurricane’ would make a brilliant opening statement in a court of law, but she took issue with Dylan’s loose use of the facts in his songs.

“Guilt and innocence . . . they are not as black and white as Dylan depicts them in these two songs,” Smith said. “I wish he would have dug a little deeper into the lives of the people he depicted. Guilty people are more than their conduct in a single instance . . . there is more nuance than these songs suggest.”

The National Law Journal reported that Dylan is the musician most cited in appellate court opinions. Long recalled doing a legal database search for Bob Dylan lyrics that turned up, among others, two citations in the last two years by members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts cited Dylan’s phrase, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose,” to prove “standing” in a case, he said.

Justice Antonin Scalia used, “The times, they are a changin’,” to comment on a case about unreasonable search and seizure of text messages.

“You get Dylan’s lyrics being used by conservatives and liberals–if you are a judge of a certain age,” Long said, “But he also cuts across generations.”

Conference workshops included “Tangled Up in Law: The Jurisprudence of Bob Dylan,” by Michael Perlin, professor of law at New York Law School; “Dylan as the Complete Trial Lawyer: Using Hurricane Carter to Teach Trial Skills,” by Allison Connelly, professor of law at the University of Kentucky College of Law; and “Bob Dylan and the Art of Taking Legal Ethics Seriously,” by Greg Randall Lee, professor of law at Widener Law School.

The event was co-sponsored by Fordham’s Louis Stein Center for Law & Ethics, Touro Law School and Fordham Urban Law Journal.

–Janet Sassi