When reading cases for law school, the important elements to consider are: the issue the court is dealing with, the court's holding and rationale, and the rule that you can take away from the decision to apply in future cases. This is rather difficult to do, especially at 1 a.m. These elements are not always clearly enumerated and you sometimes have to dig deeply into the legal jargon that fills an opinion in order to come away with the needed information. This is enough work on its own so you hope that the court can atleast coherently and logically spell out the less important elements such as the facts, in order to make your life a little easier and help ypu get to bed at reasonable hour (by law school standards). Fat chance. Apparently our nation’s foremost legal scholars are not as skilled at presenting simple facts as they are at interpreting laws and statutes, and crafting ground-breaking opinions. It's currently 1 a.m. and the following statement is the main fact upon which a tort action is based in case that I'm reading. The case involves a personal injury claim and this is how the NY Court of Appeals describes the event that caused the alleged injury:
"While the plaintiff was in the car it suddenly collapsed. He was thrown out and injured."
Are you kidding me??? The car collapsed?? What the hell is that supposed to mean? It's bad enough that we have to read these overly philosophical and prolix opinions, but the court can't even be bothered to clearly state the facts for us. If a professor asked me to state the facts of a case in class and I answered with this court's description of the events, he would probably fail me on the spot. But for judges, on the other hand, it is apparently acceptable to construct factual sentences that would make most 8th graders shake their heads. Blah!
you think thats scary? think about how many so called 'activist judges' just ignore the constitution and make legislative style rulings from their imperial, unelected throne. now THATS frightening.
Posted by: bryan | November 12, 2004 at 10:55 AM