It seems to me that lawyers as a group have a tendancy to a certain sort of dark humor which I can't really quite describe properly, but which has to do with treating extreme examples all the time, and with having to come up with really trivial seeming ways to distinguish between things which on the face are totally different. Anyway, today's example which made me think of this is this post at how appealing:

"Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas filed short opinions concurring in the judgment in which they expressed the willingness to reject any Eighth Amendment challenge to a prison sentence imposed for a criminal offense, regardless of its duration. If the defendants had been sentenced to brutal torture, however, these Justice indicate that their views may be different."