The 1998 Coen brothers movie The Big Lebowski may not have scored big at the box office, but it has amassed a cult following over time. The film, starring Jeff Bridges as amiable, White Russian-loving slacker Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, is a Raymond Chandler-esque ode about how the Dude and his bowling alley buddies are drawn into a complex search for the missing young wife of a millionaire (also named Lebowski). Its quirky characters, dream sequences, eclectic soundtrack and dialogue even earned it a spot in the National Film Registry in 2014 for its “cultural significance.” It’s even inspired its own religious philosophy (“Dudeism”—similar to Taoism), an annual festival, bumper stickers paying homage to the movie’s many memorable lines (“This aggression will not stand, man”) and even academic studies. Yes, there are professors who publish ponderous essays with titles like “On the White Russian” and “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers” in an annual compendium called The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies.
Even more surprisingly, The Big Lebowski has impacted our legal system, joining the pantheon of pop culture references to pop up in judicial opinions. National legal blogs took note of Texas Supreme Court Justice Debra Lehrmann’s shout out to the Dude and his friend Walter Sobchak (played by the inimitable John Goodman) in the 2014 case Kinney v. Barnes. The case involved Robert Kinney, a former employee of an attorney search firm who left to start his own competing firm. His former employer Barnes posted statements on the company website that prompted Kinney to sue for defamation and seek a permanent injunction prohibiting Barnes from making similar statements in any form in the future. The Supreme Court reversed the lower courts, holding that a permanent injunction prohibiting future speech is an unconstitutional infringement on free speech under the U.S. and Texas Constitutions. Writing for the Court, Lehrmann note that “A hallmark of the right to free speech” is the maxim “that prior restraints are a heavily disfavored infringement of that right.” According to Lehrmann, the intolerable nature of prior restraints on speech is a constitutional cornerstone that “has been reaffirmed time and again by the Supreme Court, this Court, Texas courts of appeals, legal treatises and even popular culture.” That popular culture reference included a footnote to The Big Lebowski, and specifically quoted Walter Sobchak’s indignant response in the movie when asked to keep his voice down in a restaurant—”For your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint.”
