American 'Road Rage': A Scary and Tangled Cultural-Legal Pastiche

Abstract

This article addresses the following questions: What kind of human situations are addressed by road rage language in the popular press? Does the legal press, consisting of bar journals and legal newspapers, deploy the road rage lexeme in an analogous fashion to the popular press? How have legal scholars, courts, and legislatures used the phrase? Has use of the road rage lexeme helped or impeded legal reasoning and understanding? The article canvasses a sample of popular print media accounts of road rage, with primary emphasis on major American newspapers. Then, the article examines the use of road rage language in the more rarified context of the legal media. This is followed by a description and an analysis of lawyerly use of road rage parlance in law review articles, legislative materials, and written judicial opinions. Finally, the article draws a few short and tentative conclusions. Driving the use of the road rage lexeme has been the result of legal culture and popular culture dissolving into each other. Popularized by newspaper reporters and editorial writers who felt need to describe what they viewed as increasing incidents of aggressive and violent behavior in and around automobiles on our increasingly congested roadways, the road rage lexeme was transferred to the legal press and, ultimately, to legal analysts in legislatures, academia, and courts. These analysts used it to explain in a short-cut, simple phrase multiple and complicated human frustrations, reactions, encounters, invasions, and bloodshed on America's highways, street corners, and parking lots. While legal analysts have attempted to define road rage, the meaning of the phrase remains amorphous and unbound. The legal community needs to be careful in deploying road rage parlance in new statutes, judicial opinions, and law review articles. The lexeme, as a cultural construct, has the potential of infusing law with a post-modern malady of subjectivity run rampant. Road rage may be a convenient legal handle, but it is a lexeme fraught with danger because it has the tendency to be so general and subjective as to border on the meaningless.