Proposed New Method of Law School Ranking

What is the salary of the alumni? That is the sincerest form of valuation by the public. A second track for low paid specialties would ask, what is the budget for which the alumnus is responsible? That is a second best measure of the quality for the government worker.

By either valid and sincere measure, the Yale graduate is likely at the bottom of the barrel of real value to the public. So, some Mississippi divorce lawyer provides far more value to the public than a Supreme Court Justice by this measurement. At the intuitive level, that seems absolutely correct. The family destroyer is doing far less damage than the nation destroyer on the Supreme Court.

Deduct Benefit of Product from Damages to Avoid Unjust Enrichment

The verdict is deeply embarrassing to the civil justice system. It has no scientific validity, nor any logic, just based on the facts in the article.

But let’s assume, the verdict is absolutely correct, and we are in the damages phase.

The plaintiff lost a specific amount gambling. 1) Should any gambling winnings go to the defendant?; 2) Should the value of the benefit of the medication be deducted, and reimbursed to the defendant if exceeding the value of the lost? He had Parkinson’s disease. Say, it was bad enough to retire him. The medicine improved him, and allowed him to earn again, to enjoy activities, to have sex, to avoid placement in a nursing home, to go out as a tourist, to run about with family members, to be funny, to sleep better. Those benefits have value.

If the plaintiff gets to collect for his loss, but does not re-imburse the defendant for the benefit, the plaintiff has been unjustly enriched.

The damage phase should also discount for discovered factors not caused by the defendant, 1) the opening of a casino quadruples the pathological gambling rate within 50 miles; 2) the plaintiff had a pre-existing condition that increased the risk (true here); 3) the casinos violated any policy or regulation designed to exclude pathological gamblers (warrants a per se cross claim); 4) the plaintiff had fun gambling, a benefit, not a damage.

Editing Internet Content Should Waive Immunity as a Common Carrier

The idea was that the telephone company should not be sued if two users plotted a bank robbery on its telephones. It is common sense to apply the same immunity to internet service providers (ISP's).

If the telephone company were to censor back robbery conversations, then its immunity should end. The same with ISP's.

Another Duty to Google: Community Standards from Search Results

Here.

We discussed the duty to Google to find a defendant, to pursue the process of informed consent. In this case, the community standard of obscenity is coming from the results of search engines.

Judge Kosinski Has Caused a New Absolute Duty of Lawyer Due Care

From this point, every lawyer has an absolute duty to demand discovery of every judge's computer and all electronic activity in e-discovery. From a rent deposit dispute in small claims to a certed Supreme Court appellate case, the lawyer must demand all electronic activity of the judge on all government and on all personal computers, and on all public computers used by the judge.

Update (September 12, 2008): Study shows costs of e-discovery are used as a tactic to force settlement to avoid its costs. The client has a right to e-discovery of the adverse lawyer, to search for an improper motive. The client has a right to e-discovery of the judge, to search for bias. It should become legal malpractice for the lawyer to not demand these discoveries of the other side.

Update (May 18, 2009): The use of blogs by judges may represent ex parte communication. Discussed here and in this article, Rachel C. Lee, Ex Parte Blogging: The Legal Ethics of Supreme Court Advocacy in the Internet Era, 61 Stan. L. Rev. 1535 (2009).

Supreme Court Rent Seekers: Lawyers Will Get Their Jobs

The Rent Seeking Theory of Appellate Decisions states that the decision will increase lawyer employment. After the next major terror attack, Federal marshals must arrest the entire Supreme Court. Brief excerpts from their decisions get read in a brief trial for insurrection against the Constitution, then they hang outside the courthouse. Their bodies stay there a month to send a message to the profession.

New Jersey Court Invents a New Liability, That of the Packager

This liability would be analogous to permitting a defamation claim to proceed against the printing company of a newspaper.

Sam Kamin Finds Teaching Sentencing Guidelines Distasteful

His profile.

In the 1970's and 1980's, the public got outraged about the soaring crime rate. It stemmed from the crippling of the criminal law by a relentless series of attacks by the Supreme court on the prosecution. None had the slightest justification in the Constitution. All increased lawyer employment. The criminal is a valuable commodity to the lawyer. Any remedy that scares or deters the criminal decreases lawyer employment.

The Executive branch named a group of judges to write Sentencing Guidelines. Congress enacted them. The criminal lover judges lost their discretion in sentencing and could coddle criminals less. As a result, the most reliable measure of crime burden, the DOJ Crime Victimization Survey showed a significant drop in crop in the 1990's. Violent crime decreased by a half.

This large drop could not be tolerated by the lawyers on the Supreme Court, as a threat to lawyer employment. The political affiliation of the Justices made no difference. Scalia voted for or wrote a series of decisions that gutted these guidelines pretextually. These decisions were Apprendi, Blakely (written by Scalia), Booker, and Cunningham.

Since this series of pro-criminal decisions, 1) sentences have decreased; 2) prosecutors have made lower offers in plea bargains; 3) the cost of trials has likely increased; 4) multitudes of vicious predators have been released; 5) the murder and other crime rates have increased.

Why would conservatives want to release so many vicious predators, and hobble prosecutors? 1) To generate lawyer jobs; 2) to effectively immunize the lawyer client, the criminal; 3) the crime victim generates no lawyer fee, and is invisible to the lawyer rent seeking Justices.

It takes about 10 years to fully experience the impact of a law. By 2010, the crime rate may return to that of the ultra-violent 1980's, when the liberal lawmaking of the 1960's and the 1970's bore its ripe fruit.

Superb Brief Objecting to Class Action Settlement

Very nice model for future such objections.

Posner and Hills: Intellectuals and Anti-Intellectuals

Hills objects to intentional impenetrable intellectual writing. Posner defends such writing as not a sign of bad faith.

The problem is that both are lawyers. Those with filthy hands should not point fingers. In the law, legal language inscrutability is a bigger problem for those being put to death, and those losing $billions due to misunderstanding, esoteric rules no one understands, and lawyer gotcha. The latter is a form of bad faith.

1) The French administrators of England taught the lawyer how to speak incomprehensibly. Dense language generates income and power.

2) Such dense language is a form of rent seeking, requiring hiring the lawyer as a decoder. Judge Posner may have an IQ of 300, but he forgot this theory in his law and economics book. It explains most anomalous lawyer policies.

3) The public owns the law, as if a toaster. It is his chattel. The dense language of the lawyer represents a conversion of the chattel by the law technician. As such, all lawyer utterances with readability scores above the sixth grade should be unlawful, and void per se. It should be a presumption that such language is in bad faith and a form of theft.

Medical Apologies

If the lawyer were writing in good faith, he would advocate excluding apology facts from future use in litigation. That would promote maximal disclosure.

If the data on apology are accurate, they show most cases are motivated by animus, curiosity about the bad outcome, and vengeance. These are improper motives for a tort lawsuit.

Most plaintiffs are scuzzy dirtbags, rejected by even greedy plaintiff lawyers in 95% of cases. If apology becomes mandatory, the doctor would be apologizing all day to vengeful dirtbags. This is just more lawyer oppression of doctors.

I would like to see a rule requiring apologies and an investigation in the 75% of medmal cases that are weak. They fail at that rate at every stage of litigation.

Member of Merchant Class Getting Fed Up

The Church offended them the same way, 700 years ago. The Executive branch beheaded part of the hierarchy, and took their lands.

This time is approaching fast for the replacement of the church as oppressor, the lawyer hierarchy. Same approach seems reasonable.

Topics for Future Philosophy and Law Conferences

1) All Lawmaking, Including Appellate Decisions and Regulations, Is Human Experimentation

2) Scholasticist Doctrine, Incompetence of Law, and the Establishment Clause

3) Is the Death Penalty Punishment?

4) The Dose-Response Curve of all Legal Remedies

5) Should Law Become More Probabilistic?

6) Justify Self-Dealt Lawyer, Judge, Legislator Immunity for Proper but Harmful Outputs

7) Immunity and Liability Are Stealthy, Unauthorized Industrial Policy

Rutgers Criminal Law and Philosophy Conference, May 30-31, 2008

Naturally, the most fun and insights were to be had in the breaks and at lunch. I express my gratitude for the great hospitality and attention these experts afforded an amateur.

In no order.

1) New Jersey prosecutors are at will employees. They cross the boss, they are at a loss.

2) Decriminilization of adult pleasures was common ground. I disagreed, advocating the buyer have a license revoked after getting in trouble from losing control of the pleasure. I may write a more detailed argument latter.

3) As an extreme utilitarian, I advocated all crime become strict liability crime, and that sentencing address the person, less the act. Each conviction stands in for dozens and hundreds of crimes, for which the criminal has virtual immunity.

4) There was an objection to allowing suing prosecutors and judges. The lawyers could support such litigation but only for misconduct, not for negligence. They are too busy. Naturally, all productive members of society are busier than they are and should have their immunities for the same reason, too busy.

5) No one knew that "reasonable" meant, "In accordance with the New Testament." They explained that the reasonable person had to be a fictional character to maintain the objectivity of the standard. If one could think about how a friend with great common sense would have behaved, it becomes a subjective term.

6) Inculpatory ignorance of non-criminal law may serve as a defense outside of a criminal trial. No one knew the case law in a regulatory dispute.

7) We argued the death penalty. Knowledge of the date is cruel. The method is kind, being less and more briefly painful than the deaths of 90% of us. There is a distressing error rate.

Rutgers Criminal Law and Philosophy Conference - Intentions Irrelevant to Permissibility

Some problems.

I think it says this.

"I am a moral philosopher. Moral philosophers should run criminal law making. I believe intention is relevant to permissibility."

If I got that backwards, tell me. The article is a long ipse dixit. It provides no external validation.

It has to address these objections.

1) Minds cannot be read with current technology. Most of the criminals are drunk or impulsive, and have little intent. Recklessness is weasel slinking away from intent.

2) Criminal Law is to remedy physical harm, not thoughts. The parameters of coverage of the criminal law contradict the argument that intention is relevant to permissibility.

3) Of the five goals of the criminal law, only safety is worth anything to the owner, the public. So, if haystacks should not be burned, criminalize open flames within a five feet radius by anyone. There is no intent in that law. The intent to impress her boyfriend by aiding the enemy still deserves hanging. I want to impress my girlfriend with my ninja skills by ripping out a man's heart with bare hands. It is a form of courtship, not an intent to harm.

4) If the wife is poisoned, the neighbor that bought the poison is no more guilty than the store owner that sold it. If the neighbor or store owner are guilty of anything, it is failure to report a plan to kill. There is no such duty under the misguided administration of the law by the American lawyer.

5) The mens rea is Latin, the language of a church. The mens rea came from a priest, Henry of Bratton. He learned it from 13th century Scholasticist philosophy, and studied with St. Thomas Aquinas. All Latin violates the Establishment Clause. The mens rea violates the Establishment Clause. Even the Church said, God would read intent in heaven. Not even the medieval church claimed man could read minds, as the lawyer claims. Henry just invented the mens rea. If you say, what's wrong with established moral principles, that a church just happens to embrace? OK. What is wrong with a Koran based, Arabic strewn jurisprudence? I read their hornbook, and liked most of it. By its Scholasticist origin, intent is unlawful in the criminal law.

6) Not only does the lawyer want a small elite who have never grown up to run the law, he wants a layer of complexity and supernatural garbage from 1250 AD that cannot be questioned because fictional. That layer will increase lawyer employment. Self-dealing without disclosure is bad faith. Put a bold black box warning, in big print, at the top of the article, "This article promotes the power of moral philosophers (me), and the rent seeking of the lawyer profession. Its content will maintain criminal victimization."

7) If the lawyer wants to get rid of punishment, no problem. It is also an obsolete relic, a form of social immaturity. Incapacitation, including large numbers of executions should replace it. As behavioral technology improves, the execution rates may decrease. Execution would solve the problem of the person, the biggest problem in crime. This means one would die for a having violent form of antisocial personality disorder, made a status crime, for the safety of others. Death is not a punishment. It is an expulsion. The lawyer may object, but mostly because it gets rid of the lawyer customer and decreases lawyer jobs. The Supreme Court would have to be emptied of lawyers to reenact status as a crime. For example, Scalia set loose a bigger number of vicious predators than Brennan. We are now undergoing the Scalia Bounce in the murder rate.

The biggest objection: Intent is church doctrine and unlawful in this secular nation. Repeal the Establishment Clause if intent is relevant to permissibility.

Criminal Law and Philosophy Conference at Rutgers

I will try to report on this conference. I may be well on my way to getting expelled before it begins.

Here are questions for Prof. Garvey about his paper.

1) What is will, where is it, how can it be assessed, within Daubert standards? Is it a synonym for impulse control? Impulse control is measurable with a timer, and has scientific validity. Will seems fictional, an impermissible utterance in a tribunal.

2) You are defending a serial killer. He controls himself for three months, then cannot contain his urges to kill for sexual pleasure. He has killed many little girls for sexual pleasure, made possible only by slitting their throats, his having the disability of sadism. You are addressing a jury. Explain the proposal of your paper which requires the defendant receive credit and mitigation for the three months he spent controlling himself. If the defendant starts a criminal career at age 25, how does one explain two decades of synchronic self-control, now gone?

3) If diachronic self-control seeks to exercise more external control in the service of self-control, isn't the deterrent effect of punishment an asset, and not an injustice? If the analogy is to losing control of an exploding bladder, then isn't jail like a Depends diaper, a remedy?

4) Doesn't this proposal add to the great burden of nonsensical mentalism? Not only do we now have to read minds for criminal intent and the mens rea, but now, also the attempt at control.

5) About half the perpetrators and about half the victims of murder are legally dunk. Please address intoxication, which is very prevalent during crime.

Additional questions from the audience:

1) What evidence beside defendant protestations could be used?

2) Give us the judge instruction to the jury.

Here is a proposed enhancement:

The much validated, Daubert safe, word, "impulsivity," is an alternative to the fictional, Daubert toxic, Aristotelian, "will."

How about this objective alternative to the restraint of will? "Treatment."

The defendant acknowledges he has a problem with impulses. He seeks formal treatment. This can be medical, faith based, support group based. The evidence is not defendant testimony but treater testimony. "He admitted having a problem. He showed up for treatment. He tried to comply with our suggestions."

Rich defendants are already doing this. Didn't Spitzer enter treatment for sex addiction after the FBI exposed his side activity? Other get religious. Any objective evidence of effort should be rewarded. The reason is that treatment has some chance of success, accountability of provider in torts, is cheaper than jail, and is proven to return about $7 for $1 of cost.

California Supreme Court Permits Homosexual Marriage

The Rent Seeking Theory predicted this ruling. The Theory also predicts that an uniformly conservative US Supreme Court will uphold it against any challenge. The rate of marriage among heterosexuals has dropped. Divorce rates may be dropping. That means family law business is suffering and must find fresh business. All permutations of marriage, including marriage to animals and other phylla will follow. That trend will be driven by the disappointing increase in business from homosexual couple. Homosexuals are not stupid. They will not get married in the numbers anticipated. One of the most intelligent of lawyers finds a way to defend the legitimacy of a decision that reversed a referendum, his being a total victim of the indoctrination of the criminal cult enterprise that is the lawyer profession. He states, these justices are elected and accountable, unlike those on the Supreme Court.

If someone wanted to make homosexuals suffer, this decision could not be outdone. The lawyer is not really interested in the marriage. It is interested in the divorce of homosexuals.
With their high death rate, and above average personal assets, the inheritance will also provide a lot of work for lawyers.

Now, if a homosexual applies for a job, he gets snapped up, as a great worker. This results in a standard of living a full standard deviation above the heterosexual mean. Once this decision has percolated for ten years, homosexuals will become less employable. One applies for a job. It is impossible to know and impermissible to ask if he is married. Therefore, one does not know if there is spouse with AIDS who will break the health insurance budget of the company. Most employers will prefer to just not hire them.

The Standard of Professional Care in Trial Advocacy

The criminal prosecution sets the standard of performance for all trial advocacy: 75% success rate.

1) The prosecutors are recent law graduates with little experience.

2) They get paid a low wage.

3) They carry dozens of cases at a time, if not hundreds.

4) Their research budgets for each case have 4 numbers if lucky.

5) The defendant has no morals, and is strongly motivated to evade punishment.

6) Their lives get threatened.

7) Their charges contain more elements.

8) The burden of proof is higher than in other actions, beyond a reasonable doubt.

9) Every element must be shown to have been intentionally done.

10) The element and the intent must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Any other type of court not meeting the 75% rate of success for the plaintiff implies a subpar performance of the judge. The judge has allowed poor performance by the plaintiff side. If the rate of verdicts favoring the plaintiff falls below 75% over two years, the judge should be removed by the administrative judge automatically.

Why Torts Die, According to Yale Indoctrination Victim

This article casts suspicion on all torts today. They may all be pretextual (false use of the law).

1) Yet, I don't know why it takes 74 pages to miss the self-evident. Those without assets are judgment proof. He also missed the Rent Seeking Theory as Grand Unifying Theory of Not Just Appellate Decisions, But All Lawyer Decisions (the so called GUTNJADBALD).

2) Here is something else he missed. Goofiness of torts, rejected by juries. It is goofy to believe that rare accidents can be foreseen. That is the central doctrine of negligence. I demand that the authors give me the four numbers for tonight's lottery. They are far more likely to correctly do so than to foresee a car accident at the most dangerous intersection in the nation.

3) Why do scams die? They did not produce enough money for the effort of the scammer. Or, people learned from experience, and stop responding to the scam. Scholasticism methodology of church and law is not just a false theory, a scam, but is also a robust business model. So, many heretics burned at the stake were wealthy. The church seized their property. The church has moved on from Scholasticism, the best of thinking and technology of 1250 A.D. It did so hundreds of years ago. It apologized for the Inquisition, the business end of Scholasticism. The goofy, ridiculous, American lawyer continues to milk its Rent Seeking strengths.

The sole remedy is to end all judicial and governmental immunities. That fairness would accelerate the cycle of tort death by raising the risk cost of false torts. It would bring the great benefits of torts to those that inflict them on others. See how they like it.

Reverse Hans by statute. Repeal the corrupt, self-dealing Eleventh Amendment. Pass Constitutional amendment ending all self-dealt, lawless judicial immunities. Pass another ending res judicata, which is just another self-dealt, corrupt judicial immunity. The oppressors on the bench are not just incompetent, but also intentionally predatory. They make stealthy industrial policy without competence nor authority. They transfer massive amount of funds from the productive to the parasitic, mostly to lawyers.

The sole justification for such immunities is that the immune sovereign can never be wrong, speaking with the voice of God, a violation of the Establishment Clause. This article shows, the sovereign is often wrong, and reverses himself.

So, it is learned that the justices knew that smokers cost less to government by their earlier deaths, not more, as claimed in the tobacco settlement. All tobacco money gets returned, with triple exemplary damages for scienter. Take a state down. Bankrupt the voters that elected these incompetent, self-dealing predators to the bench. To deter.

The tort claim is a product, dangerous in its intended use. This article shows, they get defective and obsolete.

Rent Seeking Theory Explains this Weasel Outcome

The Justices do not even have to take responsibility for it, by recusing themselves with bogus ethics pretexts.

However, massive lawyer make work now proceeds.