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I spent almost two weeks in jury selection for a murder trial and was among the last handful left as they tried to sit their final alternate when I was dismissed by the prosecutor with a peremptory strike. The prosecutor grilled me over two items: first, I had answered "yes" to the question on the questionnaire that asked if I'd ever given money to a legal defense org such as the ACLU, which really rubbed me the wrong way (how could that possibly be a reasonable item to ask about unless like the defendant was an ACLU volunteer or something?) and second, when asked in court what I thought of prosecutors and public defenders, I said I understood that public defenders offices were chronically underfunded and PDs chronically overworked and that that was bad. I'm not sure which of those two issues got me dismissed.
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Jan 30, 2020 03:31
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FrozenVent posted:Call your own insurance that’s what you pay them for. if you call your own insurance company and admit to causing an accident they may raise your rates. people settling damages outside of insurance companies is common specifically to avoid that.
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Feb 1, 2020 01:30
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in my non lawyer opinion, "prosecutorial discretion" is horseshit, particularly when prosecutors are elected officials. do the lawyers generally agree or are you guys like also broadly of the opinion that it's cool and good for the DA to get to decide all on their own what crime you'll be tried for
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Feb 4, 2020 20:34
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blarzgh posted:So, in summation, I think prosecutorial discretion is "fine and good" as its a necessary gear in the machinery, and, in the right hands it can lead to more just results (in many people's minds), and - like literally anything of power or influence - in the wrong hands can lead to injustice (in many people's minds). Arcturas posted:Depends where you live and the quality of the elected officials. Thanks to both of you for these very good responses. I would like to clarify that I am thinking not only of the prosecutor's decision whether or not to prosecute at all, but also of their choice in exactly what charges to bring. My impression is that a major component of the problem with prosecutorial discretion is the modern era (in the US) of the vast majority of convictions being obtained by plea bargain rather than a trial, and another problem is the close relationship that prosecutors develop (by necessity) with the police, who themselves have an understandably strong desire to see the suspect they've offered up convicted. Both to validate their work, and to avoid "wasting" work offering up someone whom the prosecutor then declines to prosecute. So while I immediately agree with the need, as you've laid out, to have someone who isn't the police and also isn't the judge to decide what to charge a suspect with, I think that the political influence on that prosecutor is bad, and I also think that the intense pressure that suspects in custody now experience to plead guilty to a deal rather than risk a trial (and, often, much longer imprisonment awaiting trial, especially if they can't afford cash bail or know their family will suffer having paid cash bail) necessarily results in a lot of injustice, but I have the impression our system is rewarding prosecutors for aggressively pursuing plea deals with little regard to what charges would actually be justified (not "would probably prevail in trial" or "would scare the defendant enough to cop a plea" but "would serve justice"). Where I get lost is in trying to figure out what would be better. It seems like we have too many suspects to afford to try them all or even like 20% of them, and if we don't elect DA's, are we just going to have some civil authority appoint them, like a governor or mayor, and would that be any better, especially if it's the same people who appoint judges? (when the judges aren't also elected, which.. yeah that's a related kettle of fish, eh?)
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Feb 5, 2020 05:08
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I'm sure that is a strong factor too. A prosecutor wants to get a guilty plea not only because it's easier than a conviction by trial, but because it's far cheaper, and they lack the resources to bring all or even just a large minority of charges through a trial. To me though this points not just to underfunding of criminal justice (which is rampant) but also very much Arcturas posted:the legislature keeps passing hard-on-crime poo poo and never repealing crimes And more broadly a society-wide disease in which we expect the criminal justice system to handle problems that ought to be handled differently (drug addiction, untreated mental illness, poverty...) and the response from politicians is to pass crime bills rather than fund programs.
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Feb 5, 2020 05:40
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Those two responses were really good, thank you. I have more to think about. I don't have time for a giant reply at the moment, so I'll make a couple of more offhand comments with the caveat that there's a lot more I'd like to address or discuss. First: I don't think it's possible to measure how many people take plea bargains but are actually innocent (or would prevail at trial, which I think you all understand is important to happen when evidence is weak even if the defendant is actually guilty). Any way you'd try to measure this relies on either presuming those who pled guilty were actually guilty, or, guessing at how many who plead guilty weren't guilty, or, presuming that evidence untested by a trial was nevertheless proof of guilt. Each of these presumptions has problems. Second: I think the practice of nearly all cases being plea bargained rather than tried has systematic effects. Obviously it saves money, and maybe that's good. But I think it creates some pressures: first, I think it reduces the degree to which the evidence that prosecutors rely on needs to be robust, because prosecutors can broadly assume that most evidence will go unchallenged. That in turn reduces pressure on police to be diligently careful about collecting evidence that will be admissible and hold up at trial, because most evidence gathered only has to convince a prosecutor and, perhaps, a public defender. Third: I may have an incorrect impression, but my understanding is that the prosecutor has access to the evidence, has comparatively more leisure to make decisions, and then a defendant's representative may only have access to the evidence for a short period before they need to advise their client whether to plead guilty in order to accept an offered plea bargain. And fourth: I suspect public defenders and defense attorneys are just as susceptible to the presumption of guilt of their client as prosecutors, on the basis of "well the cops think he did it so he probably did it" plus "almost everyone I've represented was guilty so this guy is probably guilty too." The ubiquity of a plea bargain being offered may serve to reinforce this impression if it leads to a higher percentage of people pleading guilty, in that a lower percentage of a defense attorney's clients ever require them to actively argue for their client's defense, and in preparation to doing so, seriously consider their possible innocence or that they properly should be convicted of a lesser crime. All that said, I'm not convinced that plea bargains are definitely universally bad or that we're doing things wrong: if I were, I wouldn't have asked. I appreciate the education. I don't think I'd really considered that the existence of a plea bargain system permits defendants and their representatives an opportunity to negotiate in their favor, where "plead guilty or be tried for X, no other offer" takes away that opportunity. And that's interesting.
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Feb 5, 2020 21:55
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Arcturas posted:Again, I don't have answers for you, but I think one thing you're struggling with is the N guilty men problem. What error rate is acceptable in our system? What are the negative externalities we're willing to accept in favor of cost and a workable system? I used to wring my hands about this question until I realized it's immaterial, because it's impossible to measure. We can never know how many innocent people we're convicting; at best, we can prove it's a nonzero number by later exonerating people with incontrovertable proof they were innocent, such as the innocence project, but that merely sets a lower bound, and dna evidence isn't available in the majority of cases. If we can't know, then the goal instead is to do the best we possibly can given limited resources; and so to me, the question becomes "are we doing the best we can" rather than "are we meeting some arbitrary and impossible to measure standard for 'good enough'".
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Feb 5, 2020 22:39
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I guess I'm still fuzzy on exactly how much access and understanding of the evidence is available to a defendant and their lawyer at the point where a plea bargain is on the table. Isn't "admissibility" tested later, at the point where a judge is involved? Don't prosecutors typically offer a plea deal as a "take it or leave it, now" kind of thing, where they want to get a guilty plea without having to defend admissibility? Don't defendants have to wonder, hmm, they say there's three eye witnesses, what will they testify to, we have no idea, maybe they're all vague and unreliable or maybe there's a witness that any jury would find incredibly compelling... how could we guess which is the case? Perhaps a concrete example might help. We're in California. A person has been arrested for assault after a bar fight in which several people were seriously injured, but nobody died. There were people in the bar. The accused tells his public defender that someone else started the fight and he was only defending himself. The police report says that witnesses claim the suspect grabbed a whiskey bottle and smashed it over another man's head, but he says that didn't happen, and in fact, someone else attacked HIM with a bar stool. The suspect has been in jail for days before finally seeing his public defender (who he didn't request immediately) and he's already given unsupervised statements to the police regarding what happened, although he did not outright admit guilt he did admit to participating in the fight. DA can charge maybe simple assault, assault causing bodily harm, or aggravated assault. Battery or even assault with a deadly weapon are on the table too. Defendant's own statements would have him at worst be guilty of assault causing bodily harm, but he claims he was defending himself so in theory could be entirely innocent with a valid defense, and he possibly could beat even simple assault charges at trial, especially if he can find additional witnesses who would testify that all he did was defend himself using a minimum of force necessary. But an assistant DA can easily threaten aggravated assault with battery, and maybe argue that a whiskey bottle is a deadly weapon when smashed over someone's head (people have been killed that way), and the public defender has to advise his client that it's possible he could be convicted of aggravated assault, battery, and assault with a deadly weapon at trial if credible witnesses testify that he grabbed that whiskey bottle and smashed it over another man's head without justification. In California, simple assault is a misdemeanor. A judge could do as little as assess a $1000 fine for misdemeanor assault and then the defendant could walk away. He could get real jail time for felony convictions. What should he do? I think in this situation the suspect is under intense pressure to plead guilty to simple assault or even assault causing bodily harm, given he could wind up going home the next day; but be stuck with an unjust conviction if he's actually innocent. I think most any public defender would have to advise this client to take the plea bargain, even if they had a pretty good chance of beating the charges at trial, because of the huge difference in consequences between misdemeanors and felonies. (e. And to the question above: has the public defender had a chance, at this point, to interview witnesses? Were they all drunk? There's video from the bar, but does it actually show the defendant striking someone? How much time do they really have to make a decision before the prosecutor can say "ok too late, we're pressing felony charges plus add-ons"?) And I don't think the DA nor the public defenders office particularly want to take bar fights to trial, especially when nobody died or suffered crippling injuries, due to costs etc., especially in busy underfunded jurisdictions, so they're all motivated to get a plea done regardless of the likelihood that the suspect is entirely innocent? I get that in this system the defendant is being given an opportunity to negotiate, but I feel like in these negotiations, the State wields immense power while even with a public defender, the defendant has almost no power. The consequences of fighting back and losing here are enormous and life-changing for the defendant. Is this justice? Any of us could potentially be caught up in a fracas in a bar, have done nothing wrong, but in the confusion of witnesses and perhaps a zealous cop, find ourselves facing a decision like this. Nice piece of fish posted:Don't ask me to justify it, my country absolutely forbids plea bargains and negotiations with the prosecution. This is interesting. What country are you in? In the above scenario, absent any ability to negotiate, how would things go? Does the suspect just get a single choice: this is the charge, how do you plea? I suppose they still face a choice, especially if it's a felony charge, of whether to try to fight it or not: but at least they're never being presented a strong motivation to plead guilty when they believe themselves innocent just to avoid the jeopardy of a much more severe charge. Right? Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Feb 6, 2020 |
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Feb 6, 2020 20:24
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I'm fascinated by the responses and I hope nobody has felt they were wasting their time. particularly that essay by Arcturas. Availability of plea bargains seems to be way later in the process than I had assumed. Also I hadn't considered that plea bargains could be used as a tool to divert people into social programs. I suppose that if you were going to get rid of plea bargains you'd have to of course make other process changes in order to not throw out babies with bathwater (presuming there's bathwater, which has been challenged here.)
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Feb 6, 2020 23:10
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This is a totally different tangent but IMO the defendant's contrition - or rather, the magic ability that judges think they have to see into the minds of defendants and determine their level of contrition, which ample evidence shows is somehow also highly correlated to the darkness of their skin - should have zero bearing on sentencing. I especially don't think "I dared to try to fight these charges against me, but lost" should translate into a harsher sentence.
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Feb 7, 2020 02:57
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I don't remember where but I once saw a thing that showed that a person who is very nervous about the answers they're giving is indistinguishable from a person who is lying with the answers they're giving; and being on the stand, especially with their freedom on the line, makes most people very nervous. I don't know how you'd tell the difference between a person who is saying things their attorney told them they should say (and maybe stumbling over them) vs. a person who is just terrified because if they gently caress up their answers they're going to jail.
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Feb 7, 2020 20:01
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Oh ok, so people who watch too many courtroom dramas and NCIS episodes and consequently think they can speak "legalese" are obviously guilty. I'm OK with that. gently caress those people.
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Feb 7, 2020 20:29
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Nice piece of fish posted:Yeah basically imagine this richard ayoade is fantastic and I've seen all of The IT crowd at least three or four times through so yeup. That guy: clearly coached by his lawyer, GUILTY.
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Feb 7, 2020 21:14
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wait in norway you get money if you beat a murder rap?
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Feb 8, 2020 23:24
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Nice piece of fish posted:Do you... not have that in the US? Volmarias posted:In some places, if you're falsely convicted, and later found to be innocent, you can apply for compensation. Just to be absolutely clear, what Volmarias is posting about is for "wrongful conviction" which means you have to be convicted, and then later exonerated, and exonerations in the US are incredibly rare. Like, maybe you win the lottery and the Innocence Project decides to take up your case, because there's untested DNA evidence proving you didn't do a murder. Or maybe after spending 20 years in prison, the real murderer is caught and they find evidence they did the murder you were convicted for. There's no loving money just for being tried and acquitted. The presumption of innocence does not extend to a presumption that people shouldn't be financially and reputationally destroyed just for being suspected of a crime. This is America, if we got rid of that, why then, it'd be marginally more difficult to use our law enforcement mechanisms and legal system to oppress minorities and the poor!
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Feb 10, 2020 02:35
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Regarding the rental car loss of use: consider that the rental car company, knowing a certain variable number of cars in its fleet will be unavailable every day due to being in the shop for repairs, has to purchase and own more cars: and in order to not have customers show up expecting a car and not having a car for them, they likely have to own enough cars that they can account for above-average days. On that basis, the rental car company could reasonably distribute its costs in terms of extra cars evenly on a per-diem rate to every customer that caused damage that resulted in one or more days of unavailability of a car. Of course, this rapidly becomes horribly complicated by a bunch of factors, but my point is that it's kind of fair for the company to consider those costs as applicable even if, in any given case, they have extra cars on the lot that day (above and beyond that "margin to account for temporary unavailable cars" factor). But, on the other hand: the very fact that this is such a customary and usual cost of running a car rental business implies that gently caress you, car rental companies, just distribute your costs to all your customers, you're already hitting people up for dent repairs on probably drat near brand-new cars at retail rates probably far more than you actually pay given you're supplying constant work to some local shop and they're probably giving you a discount, and honestly a few tiny scratches and poo poo are just the ordinary wear and tear of driving a car on the road and you shouldn't even be bothering to repair that poo poo anyway, no private owner would get a whole quarter panel repainted every time they got a scratch in the parking lot and neither should you. And then on the gripping hand: that's why you decline their bullshit insurance and use your own insurance company anyway, just let your insurer work it out and they'll probably call the rental company on their nonsense in a much more aggressively lawyerized way than you will anyhoo. Yeah?
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Feb 13, 2020 06:39
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:what's the legal issues associated with owning a right-side drive vehicle in America? I want one of the three wheeled trucks from Totoro. None of the folks in this thread about importing vehicles from Japan have had any issues specifically about them being right-hand drive vehicles; however, you should understand that it's unquestionably illegal to import a vehicle of less than 25 years since date of manufacture (to the month) that is not an exact match of a make/model/year car sold here in the US (and therefore unambiguously was tested and passed US safety standards), unless that vehicle is exclusively off of public roads. The federal government has no sense of humor on this point, and has seized and crushed very expensive imported cars in the past when people have tried to skirt the rules, such as in particular with Skylines. Also you will struggle to register any imported vehicle in California, because CARB insists on doing some expensive testing on it which you will have to pay for. Nobody in that thread has mentioned any sort of liability issue though. Certain insurers are willing to insure these cars once they've been properly and legally imported and registered.
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Feb 14, 2020 06:25
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CongoJack posted:There shouldn't be any issues owning a right side car, some rural mail carriers use one for delivering mail when they don't get a mail car to use for the route. Usually though it's some kind of Jeep so there is a US equivalent. And I've seen these things driven by private owners after they're retired and auctioned off by the post office, too.
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Feb 17, 2020 01:44
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Is "I was about to report this attempt at bribing me to the cops" a plausible defense against a charge of receiving a bribe? Let's assume I'm also claiming the bribe was unsolicited.
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Feb 21, 2020 20:01
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Does a loss in small claims court create legal precedent, such that in subsequent cases anyone could cite that first case and get a quick judgement? e. Also would they actually incur lots of fees, given their legal team is presumably on retainer?
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Feb 26, 2020 18:53
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I am reading this ruling: https://www.leagle.com/decision/inbco20190221935 The case is about the competing interests in the Buck Rogers intellectual property, which is disputed between at least three entities; two trusts each of which claims ownership, and a film company that claims the IP is now in public domain but which has been willing to negotiate a settlement. The crux of this particular hearing is the eligibility of one of those trusts for Chapter 11 bankruptcy: the court found that because the trust is not a "business trust," it is not eligible. My question is: if a trust has incurred debts far beyond its assets, and is not entitled to bankruptcy relief, then what happens? If it has few or no assets, surely the question of relief is moot, because the creditors can't lay claim to any assets sufficient to pay them what they're owed. Do the trustees somehow become personally liable for the debts incurred by the trust? Or maybe the beneficiaries? I suppose the trustee would argue that they thought the trust would prevail in court and wind up in full possession of the IP in question, the subsequent exploitation of (licensing or sale) would pay all incurred costs plus money to benefit the beneficiaries. Or if the beneficiaries somehow were liable, that'd be pretty hosed up, right, they trusted that their trustee would act in their interests and instead they wind up owing lawyers half a million dollars and wind up in personal bankruptcy instead?
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Feb 26, 2020 20:39
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Hm, that makes sense. The specific trust in question was first created in California in 1979, amended in 1983 when California adopted new legislation affecting trusts, and then later moved to Illinois when the beneficiaries moved there. The ruling argues that only federal law applies when considering whether a trust is a business trust, but the question I asked is more about how liability is assigned or works for non-business trusts, so I suppose that devolves back to the state/jurisdiciton in question, although I was assuming that there was a blanket principle at play. Something like "generally trusts can't incur debts beyond their assets" or "generally trusts that have debts beyond their assets get sued and a court has to decide how to divide assets and pay back creditors without the benefit of bankruptcy rules" or something like that.
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Feb 26, 2020 21:14
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Here, let me just preserve this evidence. I'm not a lawyer, I just enjoy preserving evidence of a person admitting that they would commit some sort of fraud or whatever that would be. 
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Mar 1, 2020 20:48
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well now I need to know how the saga ended, did he get his extra pipes and who was actually responsible for maintaining the water water retention pond???
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Mar 4, 2020 21:59
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:if i get COVID 19 from a restaurant who knowingly made sick workers work, and i have documentation that the managers made the sick employee work even after being informed of the worker's illness, i'm too depressed to finish this question? I guess is a business liable for making sick workers work? I am not a lawyer, but I would immediately wonder how you would go about proving you got the plague from the restaurant, rather than from somewhere else? Mr. Nice! didn't actually say posted:
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Mar 12, 2020 22:24
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T.C. posted:Are they seriously paying poor people, in worse situations, less money? This is a loving atrocious distinction between 'taxpayers' and 'people'. The republican senators think it's "more effective stimulus" to enhance unemployment (which pays out based on people's salaries) than to give out lump sums to everyone: the current plan is a compromise between them, to still provide some cash payout, but to scale it to people's incomes the same way unemployment insurance is. The white house/house democrat plan doesn't do that. We won't know what a final bill looks like till the house and senate hash out their compromise. e. woops, this is the legal thread? Weird thing to be talking about here.
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Mar 20, 2020 01:43
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In California a ton of grocery stores are doing that, and I think it's being encouraged by the state.
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Mar 24, 2020 03:19
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Zero VGS posted:Oh whup, Massachusetts. I know labor law here has over 40 as a protected class at least. In CA they're making the first hour of being open the old-people hours, like 8-9AM or something, and the idea is to make sure not all the just stocked products have been hoarded before the old people get a chance at them... although I think that's better done with per-customer limits on items. e.g., https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/03/17/coronavirus-shopping-stores-introduce-time-for-vulnerable-elderly-pregnant/5074064002/
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Mar 24, 2020 03:24
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imagine what happens to trump if "a politician lied about another politician" was illegal, lol
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Mar 26, 2020 20:00
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Do we even have self-driving trains or light commuter rail? That problem is so much easier to solve technically than fully autonomous cars, and yet all the light rail I've ever been on still has someone up front, even systems that were free to ride so there's no need to collect fares. I suppose you could say they're there for other public safety reasons, like to monitor passengers, open & close doors if need be, etc. but you could put cameras in every car and have remote staff monitor them to do that too. I'm gonna guess that in the event anyone comes up with super reliable full autonomy the law is going to catch up and insist that a responsible person with a brake pedal be up front all the time anyway, because inevitably one of those cars is going to run over a child and everyone will freak out even though taken as a whole they'd still be vastly safer than cars driven by (sober) humans.
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Mar 30, 2020 19:07
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Outrail posted:There's absolutely no way you can reasonably expect someone to be paying attention to the road if their car is fully autonomous. Expecting a passenger to just sit there and watch the road like a hawk 100% of the drive time ready to pump the brakes at a second's notice is just not going to happen. I completely agree with you, but legislators write laws based on public expectation, not science. The law-makers will want to ensure there's someone to blame for tragedy, the automakers will hand them millions of dollars and talk about jobs etc., so I fully anticipate that the driver who has zero things to do 99.999% of the time will still have full liability for the 0.001% of the time when they didn't slam the brakes in time to avoid the child the car decided not to notice.
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Mar 30, 2020 20:26
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Interesting. A skimming of the article suggests some trains are automated and some are manually driven, but there's no elaboration on when or why. That it's not easy to find examples suggests that we're a long way from trusting computers to drive cars without supervision, given how much more difficult that challenge is; but, as a counterfactual, train infrastructure is notoriously slow to upgrade, so it may be that we'd have automated trains everywhere by now if they were cheaper and more easily replaced on an independent and individual basis the way cars are. So it's not necessarily a strong indicator, just something I wondered about. Thanks.
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Apr 2, 2020 19:42
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in the military a lawyer that advises a court martial is called a judge avocado
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Apr 10, 2020 07:09
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Nonexistence posted:Just wait, if this person had a bad thing done realistically the damage is done. It's the landlord's issue. No, if this person is slowly dying on their bed or something, there could still be a chance. It's probably just a stuck toilet flusher or maybe a broken pipe, but there's a small chance someone is in trouble and you can't just assume "well by now they'd definitely be dead."
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Apr 13, 2020 21:39
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moral/morale, averse/adverse, eke/eek, all super common on these here forums
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May 18, 2020 21:31
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if I own a pizza restaurant, it's not super good for me if my customers get the idea that my regular, not-on-sale price is $16, and then suddenly that goes away and now they have to pay $24 for the same pizza. Maybe they will think I jacked up the prices or whatever. At the very least, I'd assume I am the one who gets to decide and moderate my discounting tactics, rather than some self-appointed delivery service. This is the same principle behind those wholesalers who tell retailers they're not allowed to advertise a super-low price on a TV, you have to click through to the shopping cart before you can see it. Right? It's not great to let a reseller undercut your prices so badly that your customers think you're ripping them off whenever you try to charge them your actual retail price. Anyway yeah I'm one of those people who just is genuinely interested in the law. The reason I don't go to law school is that I also have other genuine intellectual interests, and I can't simultaneously go to law school, woodworking school, gardening school, hiking school, photography school, and shitposting on the internet school, all at once. Also I'm 45 and already have a career. It's almost as though there's room between "doesn't give a poo poo about this subject" and "devotes lifelong career to this subject."
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May 19, 2020 23:28
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I just read that disney decision end to end (it's interesting ok) and while it was revelatory of Eisner's stupidity in promoting the hiring of his buddy, despite the fact that in order to get him they'd have to compensate him enormously because the dude was already raking in megabux annually from his old company; I did not see much or anything revelatory of the stupidity of corporate laws. On the contrary, the judge's discussion (and citation of the chancellor's discussion) tended to reinforce to me the sensibleness of the corporate laws at play. To wit, corporate officers have various duties including a duty of care, that delaware (and presumably other) corporate laws sensibly parse out corporate officer malfeasance into buckets like "bad faith" or "negligence", and that they variously shield or don't shield those officers from personal financial liability depending on the nature and severity of their negligence, bad faith, or whatever. What I already find absurd about corporate law is the way that the necessity of corporate personhood (to do things like enter into contracts) has been extended to grant corporations rights properly held only by individual citizens (like the right to political speech, itself extended to the right to make campaign donations). But I didn't see anything about that in the Disney appeal decision, it's all just fairly sensible stuff about a board letting a compensation committee determine and write complicated compensation contracts and then advise the board as to the nature and potential outcomes of that compensation contract, without requiring each individual board member to personally review the committee's notes or spreadsheets or whatever. That's kind of the point of hiring experts and then listening to what they have to say, it'd be absurd to require or expect individual board members to do otherwise. What absurdity am I missing here?
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May 21, 2020 00:41
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euphronius posted:How aware are you of the ovitz story from outside of that decision ? Not at all. evilweasel posted:the key thing with all that corporate law is that the next time you see some idiot going CoRpOrAtIoNs ArE lEgAlLy ReQuIrEd To MaXiMiZe PrOfItS as an explanation for anything you can see just how absurd the idea that anyone thinks they have a legal requirement to do poo poo in any way that matters Ah. Yeah, I already understood that very well, so maybe that's the disconnect.
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May 21, 2020 01:24
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euphronius posted:The ovitz thing was a huge debacle where basically Eisner gave hundreds of millions (a lot of money back then) to his friend for no reason. The resulting case you read was the cover up and rubber stamp Huh. That's definitely not the impression given by the judge's ruling, in which it seems clear that Eisner forced ovitz out, ovitz tried really hard not to get fired, and then ovitz got like $80M in parachute money. It sure doesn't make Eisner look good though, that's for sure.
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May 21, 2020 05:17
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blarzgh posted:So what you wind up with is alot (and I would posit its actually just a small minority, its just those are the ones you hear about) of cases where, in context a law and/or Court decision makes perfect sense, but because in the specific case you're hearing about there was a result that seems unfair or unjust, it seems like bullshit. Ah right. Yeah. Like... I guess I forgot that even though this is patently obvious to me, a person who has followed and/or read about dozens of legal cases over the last 20+ years, it might not be obvious to everyone. What actually strikes me is how hopeless appellants' case was, and how frequently I read judgements where all or almost all of one sides' arguments were so transparently worthless and without merit. Including poo poo like "you can't appeal this using an argument that you didn't raise in the original trial, dumbass" or "this appeals court can't reverse findings from the original judgement that were based on the evaluation of credibility of witness testimony", you know, what I'd have thought was basic Law School 101 introductory stuff? Is this just selection bias on my part (I'm not randomly reading decisions where both sides' arguments had merit), or do legions of lawyers habitually make hopeless, pointless arguments to courts?
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May 21, 2020 17:53
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