Lawyers Argue Quotes

Anyone ever tell you you should be a lawyer? (Otto) Only Bill when we argue. Besides, I like killing bloodsuckers too much to ever be one of them. Tabitha Deveraux. Pleased to meet you. (Tabitha)

But they argued as lawyers do, they twisted every answer I gave until it sounded like the opposite meaning, and I became so confused and afraid I found myself agreeing to statements that I knew were not true.

You might want to grab some popcorn. Because a good lawyer could argue with himself. Two attorneys going head to head is like a verbal MMA cage match with no rules.

There was something unfair about a system in which a little kid was brought into a courtroom and surrounded by lawyers arguing and sniping at each other under the scornful eye of a judge, the referee, and somehow in the midst of this barrage of laws and code sections and motions and legal talk the kid was supposed to know what was happening to him. It was hopelessly unfair.

How are the negotiations progressing?” Halt asked. Selethen pursed his lips. “As all such things progress. My chamberlain is asking for a reduction of three-quarters of a percent on the duty to be charged for kafay. Your advocates,” he said, including Sapristi in the conversation, “are holding out for no more than five-eighths of a percent. I had to have a break from it all. Sometimes I think they do this because they simply like to argue.” Sapristi nodded. “It’s always the way. We soldiers risk our lives fighting while the lawyers quibble over fractions of a percentage point. And yet they look upon us as lesser beings.

Arguing with a lawyer is not the hardest thing in the world; not arguing is.

I'm sure my parents must be proud. Or horrified. Or are bitterly arguing about whether they're proud or horrified, and have already hired lawyers to resolve the dispute. -Hayden Upchurch

We’re not arguing. We’re discussing.” “You’re a lawyer; you don’t know the difference. I’m arguing.

Everybody has a jury, the voices they carry inside. Earl Briggs sits on my jury, Gloria Dayton, too. They are there with Katie and Sandy, my mother, my father, and soon Legal Siegel as well. Those I have loved and those I have hurt. Those who bless me and those who haunt me. My gods of guilt. Every day I carry on and I carry them close. Every day I step into the well before them and I argue my case.

Some people say lawyers are sons of bitches. I won’t argue with that. But when it comes time to negotiate, it’s great to be a lawyer.

Who is to blame? The filth peddler, of course, but even more than this vulgar entertainer, the filth consumer, the public. So long as men are corrupt and revel in sewer filth, entertainers will sell them what they want. Laws may be passed, arrests may be made, lawyers may argue, courts may sentence and jails may harbor men of corrupt minds, but pornography and allied insults to decency will never cease until men have cleansed their minds and cease to require and pay for such vile stuff. When the customer is sick and tired of being drowned in filth by the comedians, he will not pay for that filth and its source will dry up.

As a lawyer, advocating for my clients, I was used to being cocky, saying my mind, and arguing. But when it came to myself, I could be shy and often I wouldn’t ask for what I wanted.

lawyer and technology writer Richard Koman, argued that Google “has become a true believer in its own goodness, a belief which justifies its own set of rules regarding corporate ethics, anti-competition, customer service and its place in society.

There was once a line marked out by God, through which were divided Heaven and Hell. And thus was chaos banished from the world. The Devil created lawyers to make amends. They argued the thickness of the line until there was room enough within it for all the sins of men to fit. And all the sins of women too. – The Bullet Catcher’s Handbook  

I know they argue about whether or not it’s right, whether or not the baby is alive at this point or that point in its growth inside the womb. This wasn’t about that. It wasn’t what the lawyers did. It wasn’t what the doctors did, it wasn’t what the woman did. It was what the mother and father did together.

The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It’s about a will and the trusts under a will — or it was once. It’s about nothing but costs now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs. That’s the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away.

I make it a policy never to argue with drug lawyers: they have decent arguments and the best drugs.

Must you argue everything?" "Yeah. I'm a lawyer.

A nonhuman animal had better have a good lawyer. In 1508, Bartholomé Chassenée earned fame and fortune for his eloquent representation of the rats of his French province. These rats had been charged with destroying the barley crop and also with ignoring the court order to appear and defend themselves. Bartholomé Chassenée argued successfully that the rats hadn't come because the court had failed to provide reasonable protection from the village cats along the route.

Are you guys arguing?” Jess asked. “Are we?” I asked. “Maybe a little but that’s okay. Couples argue. We’ll figure it out and we can have make-up sex later,” Braden said, and Bruno yipped. “Hey, I think the dog knows that word,” Mark said, studying Bruno curiously. “Look who his parents are,” Adam said dryly. “God knows what he’s been exposed to. He probably needs psychoanalysis.

When he talked, he was lawyer and bard and crossroads charlatan at once, arguing his case, entertaining, pulling back the veil to show you the secrets of the world. It was not just his words, though they were clever enough. It was everything together: his face, his gestures, the sliding tones of his voice. I would say it was like a spell he cast, but there was no spell I knew that could equal it. The gift was his alone.

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the expression of the institutionalized medium of reason, that’s all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, unprincipled, undisciplined feeling.” Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1962

He is a parrot legal, one of the few creatures the volcano tolerates near its cone. Perhaps because they are very good at arguing their cases.” “Arguing cases?” she asked blankly. “Parrots are talkative birds, and these ones like to perform legal tasks, though they are neither secretary-birds nor lawyer-birds. They are merely paralegals.

You might say that those who seek change must show that something is indeed “broken.

Mr. Fuckface, I quit. Don’t argue with me. Argue with your momma for creating such a vile, money-grubbing man.

Narcissistic people can argue like lawyers, finding cold and logical justifications for behaviors that hurt you just so they can win the argument.

When he talked, he was lawyer and bard and crossroads charlatan at once, arguing his case, entertaining, pulling back the veil to show you the secrets of the world.

When you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. When you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have neither, holler - Trial Lawyer's canard

The true stronger argument is the argument that meets some objective test of strength, and that should win.

Although a legal system is rooted in the values of its society, it also has an independent dynamic, with principles, language, and rules of its own.

Law, like taxes in the words of the great judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, is the price of civilization.

not just words, but words that carry the force of the state.

Arguing with a lawyer is about as good an idea as feeding an alligator raw beef from your palm. I was ready to give up, but Jen

A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.

The ancient Chinese saying states, “faintest ink over sharpest memory.

Don’t try arguing to someone to whom you are romantically attracted that you have a right to their reciprocal affection, or that they bear the burden of proving that you are not attractive to them.

Schools don’t teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons. The findings get more disturbing. Perkins found that IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that “people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.”22

Thank you for raising our children and running our house and taking care of all the emotional labour, which enabled me to work without distraction. It’s time for something new now but here is 50 per cent of everything we built together.’ No. They lawyer up and try to shaft you, hiding their money offshore, pleading poverty, arguing that you never contributed in any way, protesting that the kids don’t need that much.

The art of reasoned persuasion is an iterative, recursive heuristic, meaning that we must go back and forth between the facts and the rules until we have a good fit. We cannot see the facts properly until we know what framework to place them into, and we cannot determine what framework to place them into until we see the basic contours of the facts. The great economist Friedrich Hayek said, “Without a theory, the facts are silent.

It might feel, at least to some of us, that our opinions about issues such as abortion and the death penalty are the products of careful deliberation and that our specific moral acts, such as deciding to give to charity or visit a friend in the hospital—or for that matter, deciding to shoplift or shout a racist insult out of a car window—are grounded in conscious decision-making. But this is said to be mistaken. As Jonathan Haidt argues, we are not judges; we are lawyers, making up explanations after the deeds have been done. Reason is impotent. "We celebrate rationality," agrees de Waal, "but when push comes to shove we assign it little weight.

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.

Whether you're the best lawyer... Or the greatest philosopher... There will alway be at least two people that you can never win any argument with... Your child... And your wife... So don't argue with them... Just love them...

All real estate agents should be put on a decommissioned naval frigate which is then towed out into the deepest part of the Atlantic and sunk. It's rather unfortunate that, in recent years, real estate agents have become comedy betes-noires. Rather like lawyers or used car salesmen. Every time they mention their job they probably get people amusingly making the sign of the cross at them or are subjected to some good-natured, humorous ribbing. This has the effect of distorting what I'm trying to say here, which isn't in the nature of a smiling roll of the eyes and a "Tsk, real estate agents, eh?" but rather "All real estate agents should be put on a decommissioned naval frigate which is then towed out into the deepest part of the Atlantic and sunk.

The law of innocence is unwritten. It will not be found in a leather-bound codebook. It will never be argued in a courtroom. It cannot be written into law by the elected. It is an abstract idea and yet it closely aligns with the hard laws of nature and science. In the law of physics, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the law of innocence, for every man not guilty of a crime, there is a man out there who is. And to prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.

By the time the war was over, Great Britain also had a new monarch in George III, who had taken the throne in 1760. And in Boston, a feisty American lawyer named James Otis would issue his first political tract and argue that American colonists possessed all the rights of an English citizen.

NO PEACE TREATY WAS REACHED at Bruges because the English were determined to retain their former possessions in France under their own sovereignty, while Charles V was equally determined to regain the sovereignty of Guienne yielded at Brétigny. His lawyers argued that the yielding of sovereignty had been invalid because it violated the sacred oath of homage, therefore the Black Prince and the King of England had been guilty of rebellion comparable to that of Lucifer against God. While this satisfied Charles’s life-long care to exhibit a lawful case, it failed to impress the English.

Lawyers for the agency came up with an interpretation that said the NSA did not “acquire” the communications, a term with formal meaning in surveillance law, until analysts ran searches against it. The NSA could “obtain” metadata in bulk, they argued, without meeting the required standards for acquisition.

She bit her tongue on the obvious, and said, “How do I go about being an enchantress?” Henry warmed to his subject. At thirty, he was an adviser. Maybe because he was a lawyer. “First,” he said dispassionately, “hold your tongue. Don’t argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him.” She smiled brilliantly and said, “Hank, I agree with everything you’ve said. You are the most perspicacious individual I’ve met in years, you are six feet five, and may I light your cigarette? How’s that?” “Awful.” They were friends again. (Chapter 1)

Your god may be dead, but you still serve,” said Beartongue. “Do not make me break out a theological argument, Shane, I’ll do it.” Wren grinned. “We’d never argue with the bishop of a god of lawyers.” “Never? That’s news to me. You argued with me last week.” “Yes, and I was right, too. You should have let me kill him.

Fourteenth Amendment. When they looked at the wording of this amendment they saw that it granted rights to “all persons.” And so, in one of those inspired flights of human imagination that suggest the involvement of alcohol, lawyers stepped into court and argued that those rights also applied to corporations, because a corporation was really a person.

Why do adults have to diminish everything by feeling they need to end meetings with a false positive? It's so selfish. They say it not because they believe it, but because it helps them feel some kind of accomplishment when they walk away. Like they've done their job. But what do they leave behind? It's like when teachers tell Tyler that he should be a lawyer because he's good at arguing, but meanwhile he can't pass grade nine. No one wants to say he's stupid, or that he's probably going to end up in jail like his brother, so they fill his head with these stupid dreams until he's eighteen, with no credits and totally messed up for life. I say, tell the truth, squash the dream, and stop with the second chances.

Legal practice is, to a great extent, ethically ambivalent. Lawyers pledge to represent their clients zealously, and so they are charged, where their client is wrong, with trying to make the weaker argument appear the stronger. Yet, they also see themselves as officers of the court, or agents of the state, and in that role they should seek to enforce the law as intended and must act honestly.

the law itself may be inconsistent with substantive justice—it may be inconsistent with what you or I believe is right. The idea that we have a legal system rather than a system that simply says, “Do what is right in each circumstance,” represents a recognition that we must compromise about what we think may be right in order to live in a society with others who have varying visions of what is right.

17 January The Man who Executed God In 1918, in the midst of the revolutionary upheaval in Moscow, Anatoly Lunacharsky presided over the court that judged God. A Bible sat in the chair of the accused. According to the prosecutor, throughout history God had committed many crimes against humanity. The defence lawyer assigned to the case argued that God was not fit to stand trial due to mental illness; but the tribunal sentenced Him to death.

The findings get more disturbing. Perkins found that IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that “people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.

A wide assortment of children's rights advocates, lawyers, and mental health experts were watching closely when we asked the Court to declare life-without-parole sentences imposed on children unconstitutional. ....I told the Court that the United States is the only country in the world that imposes life imprisonment without parole sentences on children. I explained that condemning children violates international law, which bans these sentences for children. We showed the Court that these sentences are disproportionately imposed on children of color. We argued that the phenomenon of life sentences imposed on children is largely a result of harsh punishments that were created for career adult criminals and were were never intended for children--which made the imposition of such a sentence on juveniles like Terrance Graham and Joe Sullivan unusual. I also told the Court that to say to any child of thirteen that he is fit only to die in prison is cruel.

How do I go about being an enchantress?” Henry warmed to his subject. At thirty, he was an adviser. Maybe because he was a lawyer. “First,” he said dispassionately, “hold your tongue. Don’t argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him.” She smiled brilliantly and said, “Hank, I agree with everything you’ve said. You are the most perspicacious individual I’ve met in years, you are six feet five, and may I light your cigarette? How’s that?” “Awful.” They were friends again.

At a law school in Canada, we are in deep discussion of the law as a universal instrument that feminists should expect to be flexible. I am arguing that this is what judges are for - otherwise, justice could be meted out by a computer. The mostly male law students are arguing that any exception is dangerous and creates a "slippery slope." Make one exception, and the number will grow until the law will be overturned de facto. I am not a lawyer. I am stuck. Those young men may or may not represent the common-sense majority in the audience, but they have triumphed. Then a tall young woman in jeans rises from the back of the room. "Well," she says calmly, "I have a boa constrictor." This quiets the audience right down. "Once a month," she continues, "I go to the dissection lab on campus to get frozen mice to feed my boa constrictor. But this month, there is a new professor in charge, and he said to me 'I can't give you frozen mice. If I give you frozen mice, everyone will want frozen mice." There is such an explosion of laughter that even the argumentative young men can't resist. She has made her point: not everyone wants the same thing. A just law can be flexible. To be just, a law has to be flexible. She has saved the day.

The thing many people don’t realize about corporate lawyers is that they are nothing like what you see on TV shows. Sherry, Aldridge, and I will never step foot in a courtroom. We’ll never argue a case. We do deals; we’re not litigators. We prepare documents and review every piece of paperwork for a merger or an acquisition. Or to take a company public. On Suits, Harvey does both paperwork and crushes it in court. In reality, the lawyers at our firm who argue cases don’t have a clue what we do in these conference rooms. Most of them haven’t prepared a document in a decade. People think our form of corporate law is the less ambitious of the two, and while in many ways it’s less glamorous—no closing arguments, no media interviews—nothing compares to the power of the paper. At the end of the day, law comes down to what is written, and we do the writing. I love the order of deal making, the clarity of language—how there is little room for interpretation and none for error. I love the black-and-white terms. I love that in the final stages of closing a deal—particularly those of the magnitude Wachtell takes on—seemingly insurmountable obstacles arise. Apocalyptic scenarios, disagreements, and details that threaten to topple it all. It seems impossible we’ll ever get both parties on the same page, but somehow we do. Somehow, contracts get agreed upon and signed. Somehow, deals get done. And when it finally happens, it’s exhilarating. Better than any day in court. It’s written. Binding. Anyone can bend a judge’s or jury’s will with bravado, but to do it on paper—in black and white—that takes a particular kind of artistry. It’s truth in poetry. I

Socrates chose to drink hemlock rather than to follow morality in contravention of Athen's laws. As depicted in Plato's Crito dialogue, Socrates had been convicted by a jury of 500 Athenians of impiety and of corrupting the young. He was sentenced to die by drinking hemlock. His friend Crito tried to convince him to escape rather than to accept the immoral judgement of the Athenian state (Socrates had not corrupted the young but educated them.) Socrates responded by pointing out that he had lived in Athens as an Athenian citizen, accepting all of the benefits of its government and laws. On this basis, he had a type of "Social Contract" obligation to continue to accept the Athen's laws and legal judgement. He saw this as a moral obligation, even if the judgment at hand was itself immoral. Thus, for Socrates, and Plato, the law has its own morality, even when its results are immoral.

Well, as a general rule, most women, before they’ve got ’em, present to their men smiling, agreeing faces. They hide their thoughts. You now, when you’re feeling hateful, honey, you are hateful.” “Isn’t it fairer for a man to be able to see what he’s letting himself in for?” “Yes, but don’t you see you’ll never catch a man that way?” She bit her tongue on the obvious, and said, “How do I go about being an enchantress?” Henry warmed to his subject. At thirty, he was an adviser. Maybe because he was a lawyer. “First,” he said dispassionately, “hold your tongue. Don’t argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him.” She smiled brilliantly and said, “Hank, I agree with everything you’ve said. You are the most perspicacious individual I’ve met in years, you are six feet five, and may I light your cigarette? How’s that?” “Awful.” They were friends again.

To be precise, you and I pay government lawyers to fight as hard as they can to get as much Aboriginal land as possible and to give as little as possible in return. They act like rapacious divorce lawyers. Why? We must ask ourselves why they are doing this for us. First, our governments seem to be arguing that these negotiations are all about saving the taxpayer money. This is lunacy. You don’t save money by dragging out complex legal negotiations for twenty-five years. Protracted legal battles are the equivalent of throwing taxpayers’ money away. And you force Canadian citizens – Aboriginals – to waste their own money and their lives on unnecessary battles. Second, our governments more or less argue that a few thousand or a few hundred Aboriginals shouldn’t have control over land that might have great timber or mineral or energy value. They argue as if it were all about the interests of a few thousand Aboriginals versus that of millions of Canadians. As if the Aboriginals were invaders come to steal our land. The question we should be asking is quite different. If there is value in these territories, don’t you want it controlled by Canadians who feel strongly that this is their land? By people who want to live there and want their children and grandchildren to live there? Surely they are the people most likely to do a good long-term job at managing the land. And why shouldn’t they profit from it? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Is there any reason why Canadians living in the interior and in the north should profit less than urban Canadians do in the south? And if those Canadians are Aboriginal, is there some reason why they should profit less than non-Aboriginals?

At the heart of the Reformation message was a rejection of the power of individual believers, or of the church acting on their behalf, to affect God's judgment about who should be saved and who should be damned. Martin Luther had been convinced, like Augustine, of the powerlessness and unworthiness of fallen humanity, and struck by the force of God's mercy. Good works could not merit this mercy, or affect a sovereign God; instead individual sinners were entirely dependent on God's mercy and justified (saved) by faith alone. Jean Calvin, a generation later, developed more clearly the predestinarian implications - since some men were saved and some were damned, and since this had nothing to do with their own efforts, it must mean that God had created some men predestined for salvation (the elect). This seemed to imply that He must also have predestined other men for damnation (double predestination), a line of argument which led into dangerous territory. Some theologians, Calvin's close associate Beza among them, went further and argued that the entire course of human history was foreordained prior to Adam and Eve's fall in the Garden of Eden. These views (particularly the latter, 'supralapsarian' arguments) seemed to their opponents to suggest that God was the author of the sin, both in Eden and in those who were subsequently predestined for damnation. They also raised a question about Christ's sacrifice on the cross - had that been made to atone for the sins of all, or only of the elect? Because of these dangers many of those with strong predestinarian views were unsure about whether the doctrine should be openly preached. Clever theologians, like expensive lawyers, are adept at failing to push arguments too far and there were many respectable positions short of the one adopted by Beza. But predestination was for many Protestants a fundamental - retreat from this doctrine implied a role for free will expressed in works rather than justification by faith. It thus reopened the door to the corruptions of late-medieval Christianity.

It’s not always so easy, it turns out, to identify your core personal projects. And it can be especially tough for introverts, who have spent so much of their lives conforming to extroverted norms that by the time they choose a career, or a calling, it feels perfectly normal to ignore their own preferences. They may be uncomfortable in law school or nursing school or in the marketing department, but no more so than they were back in middle school or summer camp. I, too, was once in this position. I enjoyed practicing corporate law, and for a while I convinced myself that I was an attorney at heart. I badly wanted to believe it, since I had already invested years in law school and on-the-job training, and much about Wall Street law was alluring. My colleagues were intellectual, kind, and considerate (mostly). I made a good living. I had an office on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper with views of the Statue of Liberty. I enjoyed the idea that I could flourish in such a high-powered environment. And I was pretty good at asking the “but” and “what if” questions that are central to the thought processes of most lawyers. It took me almost a decade to understand that the law was never my personal project, not even close. Today I can tell you unhesitatingly what is: my husband and sons; writing; promoting the values of this book. Once I realized this, I had to make a change. I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country. It was absorbing, it was exciting, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people whom I never would have known otherwise. But I was always an expatriate. Having spent so much time navigating my own career transition and counseling others through theirs, I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire. I met my own envy after some of my former law school classmates got together and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because I didn’t aspire to argue a case before the Supreme Court, or to any of the other accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who’d grown up to be writers or psychologists. Today I’m pursuing my own version of both those roles.

I’ll get you a lawyer in a bit. Then I’ll call the cops. Before I do, though—” She started to speak and I squeezed her. “Listen,” I said, “When the cops come don’t say anything, don’t talk to them, don’t argue with them, don’t be hostile, don’t be smart. Do not say anything to anybody till you talk to the lawyer. His name is Vincent Haller. He’ll see you soon after you go downtown. Talk only with him present and say only what he says you should.

There’s another level at which attention operates, this has to do with leadership, I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus, to be really effective, the first is an inner focus, let me tell you about a case that’s actually from the annals of neurology, there was a corporate lawyer, who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumour, it was discovered early, operated successfully, after the surgery though it was a very puzzling picture, because he was absolutely as smart as he had been before, a very high IQ, no problem with attention or memory, but he couldn’t do his job anymore, he couldn’t do any job, in fact he ended up out of work, his wife left him, he lost his home, he’s living in his brother spare bedroom and in despair he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio specialized in the circuitry between the prefrontal area which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our radar for danger, it triggers our strong emotions. They had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and emotional centers and Damasio at first was puzzled, he realized that this fellow on every neurological test was perfectly fine but something was wrong, then he got a clue, he asked the lawyer when should we have our next appointment and he realized the lawyer could give him the rational pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks, but he didn’t know which is best. And Damasio says when we’re making a decision any decision, when to have the next appointment, should I leave my job for another one, what strategy should we follow, going into the future, should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows, those are decisions that require we draw on our entire life experience and the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain, it’s very ancient in the brain, and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words, it has very rich connectivity to the gastro- intestinal tract, to the gut, so we get a gut feeling, feels right, doesn’t feel right. Damasio calls them somatic markers, it’s a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data too - they did a study of Californian entrepreneurs and asked them “how do you make your decisions?”, these are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and they more or less said the same strategy “I am a voracious gatherer of information, I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go ahead with the deal”. They’re tuning into the gut feeling. I know someone, I grew up in farm region of California, the Central Valley and my high school had a rival high school in the next town and I met someone who went to the other high school, he was not a good student, he almost failed, came close to not graduating high school, he went to a two-year college, a community college, found his way into film, which he loved and got into a film school, in film school his student project caught the eye of a director, who asked him to become an assistant and he did so well at that the director arranged for him to direct his own film, someone else’s script, he did so well at that they let him direct a script that he had written and that film did surprisingly well, so the studio that financed that film said if you want to do another one, we will back you. And he, however, hated the way the studio edited the film, he felt he was a creative artist and they had butchered his art. He said I am gonna do the film on my own, I’m gonna finance it myself, everyone in the film business that he knew said this is a huge mistake, you shouldn’t do this, but he went ahead, then he ran out of money, had to go to eleven banks before he could get a loan, he managed to finish the film, you may have seen

Trial lawyers minded to defend America’s high litigation levels sometimes argue that, were they lower, we would require a greater degree of regulation. This assumes that litigation and regulation are substitutes: more of one, less of the other. That argument would be more persuasive if the regulatory burden were higher in other countries with lower litigation levels. That’s not the case, however. When first-world regulatory regimes have been compared, American regulatory law stands out as more detailed, complex, legalistic, and adversarial.

Try not to think of purpose as some unattainable ideal. Purpose can arise in everyday contexts: a mom caring for her child, a musician performing original songs, or a lawyer arguing in court. To carry out purpose, create the conditions for accomplishing something meaningful to you that also has a positive impact on others. In my work, I call this a “dream endeavor.

the lawyer and scholar Michelle Alexander has argued decisively in her now canonical text The New Jim Crow, the precipitous rise of mass incarceration in this country, couched as “the war on drugs,” was part of a continuous history of racial inequity that extends back through history to Jim Crow and convict leasing and slavery before it.35 In this latest iteration, leaders ranging from Presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and II, and Clinton, together with local and state legislators, enacted a strategy that blocked or reversed many of the gains secured for people of color through the civil rights movement.

The Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny has argued that the reason so many of them are so unhappy—despite being generally very well paid—is the convention of the “billable hour,” which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients. An hour not sold is automatically an hour wasted. So when an outwardly successful, hard-charging attorney fails to show up for a family dinner, or his child’s school play, it’s not necessarily because he’s “too busy,” in the straightforward sense of having too much to do. It may also be because he’s no longer able to conceive of an activity that can’t be commodified as something worth doing at all. As Kaveny writes, “Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such participation.” When an activity can’t be added to the running tally of billable hours, it begins to feel like an indulgence one can’t afford.

Every verdict by the judge stays in the frame of the law, not out of it. However, a lawyer tries to argue wrong, right, and right, wrong in the legal context; it results in the collapse of judicial transparency.

Having spent so much time navigating my own career transition and counseling others through theirs, I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire. I met my own envy after some of my former law school classmates got together and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because I didn’t aspire to argue a case before the Supreme Court, or to any of the other accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who’d grown up to be writers or psychologists. Today I’m pursuing my own version of both those roles.

It’s not enough to be smart, even brilliant,” she’d once told me. “Quick, clever, and tough retorts are fine, but if you don’t know the law, the cases, the principles, and aren’t able to argue both sides of every issue, every time, you have no business calling yourself a trial lawyer. These

Kensi Gounden writing the biography of famous American lawyer Thurgood Marshall, originally Thorough good Marshall, (born July 2, 1908, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died January 24, 1993, Bethesda), lawyer, civil rights activist, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court’s first African American member. As an attorney, he successfully argued before the Court the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared unconstitutional racial segregation in American public schools.

And it might have blown over, if Nick had not confessed. The police, at this point, did have very little evidence. They had no stolen property. They had some fingerprints they couldn’t place. The Patridge video was grainy enough that some good defense lawyer conceivably could have argued it away. If Nick hadn’t confessed to committing multiple crimes with his friends, it’s possible that nothing much would have ever happened to any of them. Why he did confess is one of the most puzzling aspects of this story.

As usual with Trump, he and his supporters (and later his lawyers) could parse his words with enough precision to argue that he did not explicitly encourage the carnage on January 6—which included five deaths, countless injuries, and hundreds of arrests of people who thought they were doing what Trump wanted them to do.

In going along with the Panic, it can be argued that they broke the Nuremberg Code and the basic public health laws that are based on that code. The politicians and their advisors could therefore be arraigned as criminals and taken to face an independent court to be tried for their crimes against humanity. Many court cases started by human rights lawyers are now underway in Western countries following exactly this reasoning.299 Criminal convictions for the politicians who violated the Nuremberg Code during the Great Panic would serve as a warning to future politicians who find themselves in similar circumstances, where in the face of overwhelming demands from their populations they could become criminals. It would give them an incentive to more vigorously combat the wave of fear in their populations, and to act within the boundaries of the law.

professional characteristic of lawyers is a critical method of thinking and of argument that has a number of components.

but why is it important to you? It is important for you to know the protections available to you against harm to your person, your property, or your organization, and to be able to advocate for yourself in these regards. Law is concerned with the allocation of responsibility, and you will from time to time need to argue with others about their responsibilities, as well as about yours.

This is why lawyers love footnotes. A good footnote preempts argument by showing the support for the proposition. It allows the decision-maker to see how well supported the argument is.

The psychiatrists lobbying for the Durham decision had broadened their own mandate from illness to mental health, and from the individual to society, and were arguing for a system that would treat crime the same way. If crime was a symptom of illness, then perpetrators were also victims, or at least bystanders of their own behavior. Doctors would act like lawyers, offering exonerating explanations of illness, while lawyers would become like doctors, demanding treatment in place of prison for those who could be healed instead of punished. As expert witnesses, psychiatrists would explain to the jury how a particular disorder, in combination with specific environmental factors, had produced behavior for which a defendant could hardly be held responsible. They would also provide the remedy, which would allow the perpetrator turned patient to return quickly to society as a productive member.

Wren grinned. "We'd never argue with the bishop of a god of lawyers." "Never? That's news to me. You argued with me last week." "Yes, and I was right, too. You should have let me kill him." "Everyone gets a fair trial, Wren." "We caught him eating that old man's face! I saw it with my own eyes! So did you!" "It was," said Beartongue heavily, "a particularly eventful trip to the library.

3.2 Argue for Procedural Benefit: To Win on Substance, Maximize Your Procedural Advantage Good lawyers, like good athletes, know that small sources of advantage are important. Each of those small sources of advantage makes our chances of winning greater, and if there are a lot of them, they make our chances of winning much greater.

I’m a solicitor, to be strictly accurate,’ Gwen tuned back into the conversation to hear Cam saying. ‘Which is like a lawyer, only more boring,’ Harry supplied. ‘Thanks for that,’ Cam said, ‘but, essentially, yes.’ ‘So you don’t do all that exciting courtroom stuff?’ Ruby sounded disappointed. ‘Barristers do the big-ticket stuff. They go to High Court and argue criminal cases. Solicitors deal with the big three.’ Cam ticked them off his fingers. ‘Divorce, death and The Council.

They taught the art of arguing, and as much knowledge as would help in this art. Broadly speaking, they were prepared, like modern lawyers, to show how to argue for or against any opinion, and were not concerned to advocate conclusions of their own.

As it happened, neither of them was wearing any clothes. As a result, one of the charges against him was for “being out of uniform.” The officer’s lawyer argued that the lieutenant was not out of uniform, as the regulations read: “Naval officers must be at all times appropriately attired for the activity in which they are engaged.” The lieutenant was acquitted.

Over 140 witnesses, including Andrew Jackson, were lined up to testify during the trial, and much like the Marbury v. Madison case before it, the Burr treason trial also raised questions of judicial power.  Specifically, Burr’s defense lawyers argued that papers and evidence from the president were necessary to proceed with the trial. President Jefferson, however, refused to release such documents, claiming the right of Executive Privilege for the first time in history.

after his lawyer argued that given the passage of time, he wouldn’t have a fair hearing. He became a pariah in the offender-profiling world. Now,

The lawyers ceded their right to argue to case before the justices. A verdict would be rendered in secret, behind closed doors, with only the brief written by J. N. Flowers to serve as the defense for Martha Lum. J. K. Young would never stand in the courtroom. He would not be present for a decision that would determine the fate of his friends and family. The consequence of Brewer’s inaction would shape history, and a verdict would be rendered with the power to oppress millions of Americans for generations to come.

St. Andrew of the Woods, Rome, Italy (1842) The next apparition took place in 1842 and was directly related to the first. Alphonse Tobie Ratisbonne was a twenty-eight-year-old Jewish man in the prime of his life who had just gotten engaged to marry. He was a lawyer from a wealthy family and was charming, good looking, and good humored. Prior to his wedding, he decided to spend the winter in Malta. At all costs, however, he wanted to avoid Rome because he hated Catholicism; the conversion and ordination of his brother Theodore had only fanned the flames of his already intense hatred of the Faith. But somehow, because of a delay with boats out of Naples and his own restlessness, Ratisbonne found himself in the Eternal City. With a few days to spend before his boat left for Malta, Ratisbonne caught up with some friends, including Baron Theodore de Bussières, who gave Ratisbonne a Miraculous Medal as a challenge to Ratisbonne’s fierce anti-Catholicism. The baron argued, “If it is just superstition, then it won’t harm you in the least to wear this or to read the memorare prayer.” Then on January 20, 1842, while waiting for the baron in the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte (“St. Andrew of the Woods”), Ratisbonne saw a vision of the Blessed Virgin. The brief vision of blinding beauty didn’t include an exchange of words, but by the end of it, Ratisbonne said he knew “all the secrets of divine pity.”3 He immediately converted to Catholicism, joined the priesthood, and moved to Israel with a ministry to convert the Jews. Ratisbonne’s conversion was so significant that even the pope heard of it and wanted to learn more about this “miraculous medal” and the nun who had it cast. The medal’s popularity swelled and Sister Catherine’s waned as she remained just another cloistered nun among many.

In February 2011 a conference of lawyers from the Commonwealth was held in Hyderabad. Surprisingly, no member of the Executive Committee of the Supreme Court Bar Association was invited to attend, but it has been reported that during the conference, the prime minister complained against judicial interference with the workings of the government which, in its arrogance, considers itself to be omniscient and omnipotent. He apparently forgot that a litigant must argue his case in court and not in a public meeting.

Google’s trucks would pull up to libraries and quietly walk away with boxes of books to be quickly scanned and returned. “If you don’t have a reason to talk about it, why talk about it?” Larry Page would argue, when confronted with pleas to publicly announce the existence of its program. The company’s lead lawyer on this described bluntly the roughshod attitude of his colleagues: “Google’s leadership doesn’t care terribly much about precedent or law.” In this case precedent was the centuries-old protections of intellectual property, and the consequences were a potential devastation of the publishing industry and all the writers who depend on it. In other words, Google had plotted an intellectual heist of historic proportions. What motivated Google in its pursuit? On one level, the answer is clear: To maintain dominance, Google’s search engine must be definitive. Here was a massive store of human knowledge waiting to be stockpiled and searched. On the other hand, there are less obvious motives: When the historian of technology George Dyson visited the Googleplex to give a talk, an engineer casually admitted, “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” If that’s true, then it’s easier to understand Google’s secrecy. The world’s greatest collection of knowledge was mere grist to train machines, a sacrifice for the singularity. Google is a company without clear boundaries, or rather, a company with ever-expanding boundaries. That’s why it’s chilling to hear Larry Page denounce competition as a wasteful concept and to hear him celebrate cooperation as the way forward. “Being negative is not how we make progress and most important things are not zero sum,” he says. “How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?” And it’s even more chilling to hear him contemplate how Google will someday employ more than one million people, a company twenty times larger than it is now. That’s not just a boast about dominating an industry where he faces no true rivals, it’s a boast about dominating something far vaster, a statement of Google’s intent to impose its values and theological convictions on the world.

These victories arose from the determined efforts of a group of lawyers who risked public odium by defending fugitive slaves in court and challenging the long-standing system of black indentured servitude. John M. Palmer, Gustave Koerner, and Orville H. Browning, all future Republican politicians, argued that blacks held to long-term indentures were free, and fought their cases in court without charge. In the 1850s, Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon represented fugitive slaves pro bono.

As a lawyer Travis was a fan of arguing—arguing till the original argument had been lost so far back in the tangle of discussion that it became irrelevant and all that mattered was that he was clearly right

Representing him. It’s a thing we lawyers do.” He leaned back on his elbows. “It’s super fun if you like arguing with people.” “But

different varieties of plants is a hobby. He spends some time in his mango garden before attending court. “As a criminal lawyer, I argued several cases in the last ten years. But, doing farm work and growing organic food gives me

The advantages of using account of the legal defense DUI professional According to a DUI or DWI they have very high values, and can be much more difficult, if not able to qualified lawyer in these types of services. It important to get the services of professionals who are familiar with the course of DUI criminal record because the team is almost certainly best, highest paid on the common law also working for many years in a row, and he is almost certain that the officials involved to enforce the law and choose the most effective way. The consumption can peak at promoting the method of blood flow to help ease and the minimum number of punches than likely. Even if you do not want the removal of a fence of a demo, it is deliberately allowed to produce only for the ingredients so suddenly that the interest will be at least in his imprisonment and the decision of the necessary business expense. Education Lawyer, worth DUI, because they understand the rules on the details of the DUI. Great leadership only recognizes attorneys who offer surgery that seemed to bend the lowest possible cost. Field sobriety tests are defense without success, and when the lawyer to provide classroom-oriented, to the surprise of identifying the brain decides what industry breathalyzer sobriety vote or still under investigation. Trying to fight against DUI private value, it may be impossible for the layman is that much of the Berufsrecht did. DUI lawyer can be a file with the management consultants can be used or deny the accuracy of the successful management of blood or urine witnesses. Almost always one day, you can not help learning tool. If there is a case where the amount, solid, is the legal adviser to shock and other consultants witnesses are willing to cut portions and finds out she has some tire testing and influence. Being part of the time, problems with eating problems and more experience DUI attorney in looks secrets and created. The idea that the lawyer is suddenly more than the end result of controlling historical significance of countless people do not share the court made. It very appropriate, qualified, but two at the end of every little thing that you do not agree even repentance and uses for what was happening right opportunity. It can not be argued, perhaps, costs, what seems to be one that includes many just go to the airport to record driving under the influence, but their professional experience and meetings, both issues related to diversity, Lange random taxation measures. Many people today claim that the market is in DUI cases, of course, exhausted, and are a lawyer, go to their rights in the region.

There was once a line marked out by God, through which were divided Heaven and Hell. And thus was chaos banished from the world. The Devil created lawyers to make amends. They argued the thickness of the line until there was room enough within it for all the sins of men to fit. And all the sins of women too. – The Bullet Catcher’s Handbook

I mostly saw Vince Foster in the hallways. He was Mrs. Clinton’s personal attaché, a lawyer from Arkansas. Word circulated that she berated him mercilessly. The first time I saw Foster I figured he wouldn’t last a year. He looked uncomfortable and unhappy in the White House. I knew what it was like to be yelled at by superiors, but Mrs. Clinton never hesitated to launch a tirade. Yet her staffers never dared say, “I don’t have to take this shit!” They reminded me of battered wives: too loyal, too unwilling to acknowledge they’d never assuage her. They had no one to blame but themselves, but they could never admit it. She criticized Foster for failing to get ahead of the constant scandals, for cabinet positions not confirmed, and for the slowness of staffing the White House. Foster eventually took his own life in Fort Marcy Park. In his briefcase was a note torn into twenty-seven pieces, blaming the FBI, the media, the Republicans—even the White House Ushers Office. A rumor circulated among law enforcement types that contended his suicide weapon had to be repaired in order for the forensics team to fire it since it wouldn’t function for them. Maybe his final shot misaligned the cylinders and later prevented contact with the bullet primers. But that, along with many other public details of the case (carpet fibers on his suit coat, etc.), made his case spooky. The last lines of his sparse suicide note read: “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.” A UD friend of mine, Hank O’Neil, was posted outside of Foster’s office as part of the FBI’s investigation of his suicide. Maggie Williams, Mrs. Clinton’s always well dressed chief of staff, physically pushed her way past Hank into Foster’s office, arguing that he had no right to block her entrance. She removed boxes that were never recovered; they were destroyed. Congressmen bashed Officer O’Neil’s integrity, but he held firm. He reported exactly what he saw and didn’t make any inferences about it, but they were sure he held some smoking gun and was protecting the Clintons.

The FLDS was in the news in 2008 when Texas authorities raided their Yearning for Zion Ranch, and discovered girls who appeared to be pregnant, records of underage marriages, and a bed in the sanctuary.65 The authorities prosecuted and convicted eleven men, including Warren Jeffs.66 Throughout the proceedings, their lawyers argued that the prosecutions were “anti-religious” and were in violation of their constitutional rights. This is the kind of discourse we, as a culture, have encouraged. It is dangerous when courts listen.