Plaintiff Quotes

The judge's massive eyebrows crept up. "Kaldar. Are you the one speaking for the plaintiff today?" "Yes, Your Honor." "Well, shit," Dobe said. "I guess you're familiar with the law. You hit it over the head, set its house on fire, and got its sister pregnant.

The world is not a courtroom There is no judge no jury no plaintiff. This is a caravan filled with eccentric beings telling wondrous stories about God.

Another Boston Globe editorial complained that the burden of proof “now shifts to the plaintiff ”10—as if this were an unusual place for the burden of proof to be.

Conventional wisdom says if a jury is going to no-cause the plaintiff—award no damages—the verdict will be swift. Similar logic applies to criminal trials where juries will, within hours, convict people, but take days to acquit. In civil cases, this rule is more than courtroom legend . . . A defense verdict requires one finding—the defendant was not responsible . . . A plaintiff verdict requires a finding of liability and evaluation of damages, something not needed in a defense verdict. Thus, by sheer evidence evaluation, a jury has more work to do when rendering a verdict in favor of the plaintiff.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

A good, contented, well-breakfasted juryman, is a capital thing to get hold of. Discontented or hungry jurymen, my dear Sir, always find for the plaintiff.

Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering… since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.

When law students prepare to argue for either the plaintiff or defendant in a moot court, they come to believe that their side of the case is both morally and legally in the right—even when the sides were randomly assigned.

When in court, the primary role of lawyers is not to prove or disprove innocence; unbeknown to almost all lawyers and their clients, it is to save the court time.

If jurors were looking for a way to come back finding for the UKA, Mays had given it to them. Senator Michael Figures made the plaintiff’s final arguments. He had been there on Herndon Street the morning of the lynching, and he had seen Donald’s body hanging from a tree. He had been

You have both contested well: the one is forced by his sorrow to lament, the other by the plaintiff’s attack to tell the truth. So plaintiff, yours is the honour! And Death, yours is the victory! Every man is obliged to give his life to Death, his body to the earth, and his soul to Us.

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

Reeking blood, overcrowded cemeteries, weeping mothers—these are formidable plaintiffs. When the earth is suffering from a surcharge, there are mysterious moanings from the deeps that the heavens hear. Napoleon had been impeached before the Infinite, and his fall was decreed. He annoyed God. Waterloo is not a battle; it is the changing face of the universe.

A court case is usually a competition to prove the innocence of the innocent … or the guilty.

In 1960, The New York Times printed an advertisement titled “Heed Their Rising Voices” that attempted to raise money to defend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. against perjury charges in Alabama. Southern officials responded by going on the offensive and suing the newspaper. Public Safety Commissioner L. B. Sullivan and Governor Patterson claimed defamation. A local jury awarded them half a million dollars, and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan changed the standard for defamation and libel by requiring plaintiffs to prove malice—that is, evidence of actual knowledge on the part of the publisher that a statement is false. The ruling marked a significant victory for freedom of the press, and it liberated media outlets and publishers to talk more honestly about civil rights protests and activism.

Nearly every plaintiff testified in almost exactly the same words, describing behavior that included the exact minimum requirements and even the precise legal phrases needed for a fault-based divorce. “The number of cruel spouses in Chicago, both male and female, who strike their marriage partners in the face exactly twice, without provocation, leaving visible marks, is remarkable,” noted the author of one 1950s divorce study.15

But the “relief” plaintiffs sought in many of these cases were changes to election policy that the Democratic Party had wanted for years, such as the expansion of mail-in voting and the relaxation or removal of scrutiny of mail-in ballots.

The written judgment proceeded. “The Industrial Commission finds that…a relation of employer and employee existed between the company and the plaintiff… [Catherine Donohue’s] disability did arise out of and come in the course of her employment

Studying the rule of law won't make a great litigator. It is the act of trying cases in real courtrooms with real plaintiffs and defendants and judges and juries, week after week and year after year that develops lawyers into top trial attorneys.

In a landmark ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan changed the standard for defamation and libel by requiring plaintiffs to prove malice--that is, evidence of actual knowledge on the part of the publisher that a statement is false. The ruling marked a significant victory for freedom of the press, and it liberated media outlets and publishers to talk more honestly about civil rights protests and activism. But in the South it generated even more contempt for the national press, and that animosity has lingered beyond the Civil Rights Era.

In a landmark ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan changed the standard for defamation and libel by requiring plaintiffs to prove malice—that is, evidence of actual knowledge on the part of the publisher that a statement is false. The ruling marked a significant victory for freedom of the press, and it liberated media outlets and publishers to talk more honestly about civil rights protests and activism. But in the South it generated even more contempt for the national press, and that animosity has lingered beyond the Civil Rights Era. I

He wondered, often, what it would look like if and when the shit in question hit the fan: The stock market at bottom was rigged. The icon of global capitalism was a fraud. How would enterprising politicians and plaintiffs’ lawyers and state attorneys general respond to that news?

The majority in Plessy v. Ferguson asserted that separation and equality were wholly separate ideas. “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon

Your witness,” the attorney snapped to Roark. “No questions,” said Roark. Dominique left the stand. The attorney bowed to the bench and said: “The plaintiff rests.” The judge turned to Roark and made a vague gesture, inviting him to proceed. Roark got up and walked to the bench, the brown envelope in hand. He took out of the envelope ten photographs of the Stoddard Temple and laid them on the judge’s desk. He said: “The defense rests.

Of course, .. you need to find the defendant guilty of negligence as the proximate cause of your injuries, but that is to say even once negligence is established, since the scope of the defendant’s liability can be no greater than the duty of care he owes to the plaintiff, he has not breached his duty if he has no duty and therefore he has no liability, and so in this case I suppose you would take the position that you owe a duty of care to yourself?

In cases of invasion or insurrection, if the town-officers neglect to furnish the necessary stores and ammunition for the militia, the township may be condemned to a fine of from $200 to $500. It may readily be imagined that in such a case it might happen that no one cared to prosecute; hence the law adds that all the citizens may indict offences of this kind, and that half of the fine shall belong to the plaintiff. See Act of March 6, 1810, vol. ii. p. 236.

The case was a suit by a merchant in South Carolina against the state of Georgia for a Revolutionary War debt. The plaintiff sued directly in the Supreme Court under the provision of Article III that gave the Court jurisdiction over suits between a state and a citizen of a different state. The Court rejected Georgia’s argument that as a sovereign state it was immune from suit without its consent. When Georgia refused to appear, the Court entered a default judgment against it.

Perhaps the real revelation is simply that life has caught up with you. All this time, when you thought you were fooling everyone, that was only because no one was paying attention. But eventually the world does pay attention, and suddenly it is you who are on trial, not the world but you. The trial you'd managed to put off for years is finally underway and you see, now, that you are not the plaintiff, as you'd always assumed, but the defendant, not the accuser but the accused.

In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32

she’d been offered money to attend parties hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire investor, and attended by Trump. Hair-curling allegations of sexual violence followed: the lawsuit contended that the plaintiff and other minors were forced to perform sex acts on Trump and Epstein, culminating in a “savage sexual attack” by Trump; that Trump had threatened the plaintiff and her family with physical harm should she ever speak; and that both Trump and Epstein were told that the girls involved were underage.

In its 2013 annual report on “Global Risks,” the World Economic Forum (host of the annual superelite gathering in Davos), stated plainly, “Although the Alaskan village of Kivalina—which faces being ‘wiped out’ by the changing climate—was unsuccessful in its attempts to file a US$ 400 million lawsuit against oil and coal companies, future plaintiffs may be more successful. Five decades ago, the U.S. tobacco industry would not have suspected that in 1997 it would agree to pay $368 billion in health-related damages.

In a landmark ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan changed the standard for defamation and libel by requiring plaintiffs to prove malice—that is, evidence of actual knowledge on the part of the publisher that a statement is false. The ruling marked a significant victory for freedom of the press, and it liberated media outlets and publishers to talk more honestly about civil rights protests and activism. But in the South it generated even more contempt for the national press, and that animosity has lingered beyond the Civil Rights Era.

Paul was an attorney. And this was what his as yet brief career in the law had done to his brain. He was comforted by minutiae. His mortal fears could be assuaged only by an encyclopedic command of detail. Paul was a professional builder of narratives. He was a teller of concise tales. His work was to take a series of isolated events and, shearing from them their dross, craft from them a progression. The morning’s discrete images—a routine labor, a clumsy error, a grasping arm, a crowded street, a spark of fire, a blood-speckled child, a dripping corpse—could be assembled into a story. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories reach conclusions, and then they go away. Such is their desperately needed magic. That day’s story, once told in his mind, could be wrapped up, put aside, and recalled only when necessary. The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory. Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation. The real world is overfull with incidents, brimming over with occurrences. In our stories, we disregard most of them until clear reason and motivation emerge. Every story is an invention, a technological device not unlike the very one that on that morning had seared a man’s skin from his bones. A good story could be put to no less dangerous a purpose. As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones. There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers. The slandered and the liars. The swindled and the thieves. Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiff—or his defendant—became overwhelming. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned.

have been answered well before the election. In June 2016, an anonymous plaintiff, using the pseudonym Katie Johnson and later Jane Doe, filed a lawsuit accusing Trump of raping her when she was thirteen years old—the same age that Ivanka was that year. Jane Doe’s claim was consistent with verifiable facts from the court case against convicted billionaire underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, for whom Jane Doe was forced to work. In 2002, Trump told New York magazine that he had known Epstein, a financier with a mysterious past, for fifteen years and thought he was a “terrific guy.”5

Might it have been possible for Napoleon to win this battle? We answer no. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God. For Bonaparte to be conqueror at Waterloo was no longer within the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of acts was under way in which Napoleon had no place. The ill-will of events had long been coming. It was time for this titan to fall. The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the equilibrium. This individual alone counted for more than the whole of mankind. This plethora of all human vitality concentrated within a single head, the world rising to the brain of one man, would be fatal to civilization if it endured. The moment had come for incorruptible supreme equity to look into it. Probably the principles and elements on which regular gravitation in the moral and material orders depend had begun to mutter. Reeking blood, overcrowded cemeteries, weeping mothers–these are formidable plaintiffs. When the earth is suffering from a surcharge, there are mysterious moanings from the deeps that the heavens hear. Napoleon had been impeached before the Infinite, and his fall was decreed. He annoyed God. Waterloo is not a battle; it is the changing face of the universe.

Once the question of grace and free will is reduced to a juridical matter, once witnesses line up with plaintiff or defendant and the jurors strive to determine who is entitled to what, we are inevitably tempted to act as if everything that was given to free will was taken from grace and everything conceded to grace was withdrawn from our own liberty. On both sides of the debate, whether one is arguing "for grace" or whether one is a defender of "nature," it seems that everyone is more or less obsessed with this great illusion of ownership and possession. What is strictly mine? How much can God demand of me - how much can I demand of Him? Even if I come up with the answer that nothing is strictly mine at all, I have still falsified the perspective by asking a foolish question in the first place. "How much is mine?" Should such a question ever be asked? Should such a division ever be made at all? To ask such a question makes it almost impossible for me to grasp the paradox which is the only possible answer: That everything is mine precisely because everything is His. If it were not His, it could never be mine. If it could not be mine, He would not even want it for Himself. And all that is His is His very self. All that He gives me becomes, in some way, my own self. What, then is mine? He is mine. And what is His? I am His.

But because of her nature, Parks was the perfect plaintiff. Not only because she was a devout Christian, not only because she was an upstanding citizen, but also because she was gentle. “They’ve messed with the wrong one now!” the boycotters would declare as they traipsed miles to work and school. The phrase became a rallying cry. Its power lay in how paradoxical it was. Usually such a phrase implies that you’ve messed with a local heavy, with some bullying giant. But it was Parks’s quiet strength that made her unassailable. “The slogan served as a reminder that the woman who had inspired the boycott was the sort of soft-spoken martyr God would not abandon,” writes Brinkley.

A Muslim woman in Michigan was the plaintiff in a lawsuit a few years ago, and she came to court wearing the traditional niqab, a veil covering all but her eyes. The judge asked her to take it off. She refused. So the judge dismissed her case. He didn’t think he could fairly adjudicate a disagreement between two parties when he couldn’t see one of them. He told her: One of the things that I need to do as I am listening to testimony is I need to see your face and I need to see what’s going on. And unless you take that off, I can’t see your face and I can’t tell whether you’re telling me the truth or not, and I can’t see certain things about your demeanor and temperament that I need to see in a court of law.2 Do you think the judge was right? I’m guessing many of you do.

King Alfred’s Book of Laws, or Dooms, as set out in the existing laws of Kent, Wessex, and Mercia, attempted to blend the Mosaic code with Christian principles and old Germanic customs. He inverted the Golden Rule. Instead of “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you”, he adopted the less ambitious principle, “What ye will that other men should not do to you, that do ye not to other men”, with the comment, “By bearing this precept in mind a judge can do justice to all men; he needs no other law-books. Let him think of himself as the plaintiff, and consider what judgment would satisfy him.” The King, in his preamble, explained modestly that “I have not dared to presume to set down in writing many laws of my own, for I cannot tell what will meet with the approval of our successors.

Athenian democracy, though it had the grave limitation of not including slaves or women, was in some respects more democratic than any modern system. Judges and most executive officers were chosen by lot, and served for short periods; they were thus average citizens, like our jurymen, with the prejudices and lack of professionalism characteristic of average citizens. In general, there were a large number of judges to hear each case. The plaintiff and defendant, or prosecutor and accused, appeared in person, not through professional lawyers. Naturally, success or failure depended largely on oratorical skill in appealing to popular prejudices. Although a man had to deliver his own speech, he could hire an expert to write the speech for him, or, as many preferred, he could pay for instruction in the arts required for success in the law courts. These arts the Sophists were supposed to teach.

FORGET FERES DOCTRINE And the military has immunity! Yes! The feres doctrine! It states “the Government is not liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act for injuries to servicemen where injuries arise out of or are in the course of activity incident to service” (U.S. Supreme Court 1950). Federal law and our Supreme Court shield acts of rape and sexual brutality in the military as proven by its subsequent ruling on a 2001 case that denied a plaintiffs right to file a civil suit against her accusers. Yet when women report the crime, it is handled internally Commanders are given the discretion to resolve complaints. The report may not go beyond his office. Many times he's part of the problem or a sympathizer with the offender. This certainly was my case! Our Supreme Court ruled as recently as 2001 that rape is an injury incident to the course of activity in the service! THE HEINOUS CRIME OF RAPE IS ACCEPTABLE AND CONDONED BY OUR SUPREME COURT! WOMEN ARE FAIR GAME FOR RAPE AND HARRASSMENT, ACCORDING TO OUR SUPREME COURT! CONGRESS IS NO BETTER! NO LAWS ARE PASSED TO PROTECT US IN THE MILITARY AGAINST THE STATUTE OF LIMITATION FOR THE FELONY OF RAPE!

The legal argument the ACLU used to support Engel and his fellow plaintiffs was that the Regents’ nondenominational prayer violated the Establishment Clause. The ACLU backed its argument not with a clause in the Constitution, but with a phrase taken from a private letter written by President Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut on January 1, 1802, Jefferson wrote that the First Amendment, enacted on behalf of all the American people, “declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”7 Jefferson coined the metaphor of a wall of church-state separation to assure the Baptists in Connecticut that the government would never infringe on the free exercise of their religion. The ACLU stood Jefferson’s reassurance on its head, turning it into a rationale for suppressing the free exercise of religion. That phrase, “wall of separation between church and state,” became a bumper-sticker slogan for leftists and secularists who want to silence religious people and marginalize their beliefs.

Sometimes reparations is used to justify a feeding frenzy in which minority claimants simply raid the U.S. Treasury en masse while government bureaucrats facilitate a large transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to these so-called historical victims. A scandalous example of this is the Pigford case. Some ninety-one black farmers had sued the U.S. government alleging a legacy of bias against African Americans. Rather than settle the suit and pay the farmers a reasonable compensation, the Obama administration used the lawsuit to make an absurdly expensive settlement. It agreed to pay out $1.33 billion to compensate not only the ninety-one plaintiffs but also thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court. Encouraged by this largesse, law firms began to conjure up new claimants. Later reviews showed that some of these claimants were nursery-school-age children and even urban dwellers who had no connection to farming. In some towns, the number of people being paid was many times greater than the total number of farms. According to the New York Times, one family in Little Rock, Arkansas, had ten members each submit a claim for $50,000, netting $500,000 for the family without any proof of discrimination. Then the Native Americans got in on the racket, and the Obama administration settled with them, agreeing to fork over an additional $760 million. The government also reimbursed hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees, a cornucopia for trial lawyers who also happen to be large contributors to Obama and the Democratic Party. Altogether the Pigford payout is estimated to have cost taxpayers a staggering $4.4 billion.3

Here, for example, is a hypothetical: A football team is going to an away game when one of their vans breaks down. So they ask the mother of one of the players if they can borrow her van to transport them. Sure, she says, but I’m not going to drive. And so she asks the assistant coach to drive the team for her. But then, as they’re driving along, something horrible happens: the van skids off the road and flips over; everyone inside dies. There is no criminal case here. The road was slippery, the driver wasn’t intoxicated. It was an accident. But then the parents of the team, the mothers and fathers of the dead players, sue the owner of the van. It was her van, they argue, but more important, it was she who appointed the driver of her van. He was only her agent, and therefore, it is she who bears the responsibility. So: What happens? Should the plaintiffs win their suit? Students don’t like this case. I don’t teach it that often—its extremity makes it more flashy than it is instructive, I believe—but whenever I did, I would always hear a voice in the auditorium say, “But it’s not fair!” And as annoying as that word is—fair—it is important that students never forget the concept. “Fair” is never an answer, I would tell them. But it is always a consideration. He never mentioned whether something was fair, however. Fairness itself seemed to hold little interest for him, which I found fascinating, as people, especially young people, are very interested in what’s fair. Fairness is a concept taught to nice children: it is the governing principle of kindergartens and summer camps and playgrounds and soccer fields. Jacob, back when he was able to go to school and learn things and think and speak, knew what fairness was and that it was important, something to be valued. Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities. Right and wrong, however, are for—well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people. Or am I just thinking this now? “So were the plaintiffs successful?” I asked. That year, his first year, I had in fact taught that case. “Yes,” he said, and he explained why: he knew instinctively why they would have been. And then, right on cue, I heard the tiny “But it’s not fair!” from the back of the room, and before I could begin my first lecture of the season—“fair” is never an answer, etc., etc.—he said, quietly, “But it’s right.

I believe that the victims and their families should start lodging civil actions for negligence against the politicians. Allowing treasonous murderers into our countries, at the tragic cost to our citizens is worthy of a court action. And as soon as the first judgment goes in favour of the plaintiff, that will change the immigration policies overnight, because, as we know, money is the only thing that talks.

My argument will have to be that the plaintiff, who’s dead, wasn’t going to earn that much, because, after all, he wasn’t good enough to earn a promotion. And as far as pain and suffering, don’t pay him for that because he died within a year, so he didn’t suffer that long.

Artist M. v. Johnson, 917 F.2d 980 (7th Cir. 1990): Does the federal Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 create a right under which a plaintiff may bring a claim that an organization bound under that legislation has violated such legislation and that the state is equally bound by such federal legislation under 42 U.S.C. § 1983? Yes.

The Accuser was not impressed by any of this. A transformed seraph himself, his plaintiffs were all Sons of God as well. His opposition did not intimidate him at all. He and Semjaza, along with almost two hundred Watchers, presented themselves across from the array they despised. They considered the throne-circling adversaries to be a mob of sycophants, yes-men and sell-outs, puppets and tools. The Accuser, Semjaza, and their fellow Watchers were just as divine, and maybe even more powerful than their enemies because at least they exercised free will — real free will — iron will. That will did have to bend to the sovereignty of the Judge, however, to the use of their original heavenly names of Semjaza, Baraqel, and Zaqiel instead of their Shinarian deity names of Anu, Enlil, and Nanna.

The Seraphim spoke as one. Their voice thundered like the sound of many waters. “Elohim has taken his place in the divine council. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment.” Everyone fell silent. This lawsuit would be different from all others because of the legal procedure to be employed. Normally, plaintiff and defendant would stand in the bar before the Judge and make their arguments, calling forth testimony and producing evidence upon which the Judge would rule. But since the Judge himself was being charged by the Accuser, there would be no need of additional testimony or cross examination. The Accuser would make the complaint, and Enoch would speak in defense of Yahweh Elohim. After presentation of all oral arguments, the Judge would make a righteous summary judgment. Special circumstances dictated special procedures.

Judge Raymond J. Brassard was a Republican appointee and not considered particularly favorable to plaintiffs’ attorneys.

They explained how they were both plaintiffs at a court nearby. The court was held every Quarter Day to settle arguments and punish wrongdoers among their people, but unfortunately the race to which they belonged was a peculiarly wicked and quarrelsome one, and just at present no suits could be heard because they could not find an impartial judge; every venerable person among them either stood accused of a crime, or else had been found to have some other close connexion with one of the suits.

On December 20, 2005, Judge John E. Jones III, appointed by President George W. Bush, with the strong endorsement of Pennsylvania's staunch conservative senator Rick Santorum, ruled for our plaintiffs in a superbly written 139-page opinion that shocked many observers.

One of the more amusing manifestations of this disquiet is an episode of the animated series South Park . After a visit from the ‘‘Sexual Harassment Panda,’’ the children of South Park begin to sue each other for harassment over minor insults. Eventually, the children pursue deeper pockets, the school at which these insults take place. The school is bankrupted, while Kyle’s attorney father, who represents all of the plaintiffs, becomes wealthy. This leads to the following exchange: Father: You see, son, we live in a liberal democratic society. The Democrats [sic—it was a mostly Republican EEOC and Supreme Court] created sexual harassment law, which tells us what we can and cannot say in the workplace, and what we can and cannot do in the workplace. Kyle: But isn’t that fascism? Father: No, because we don’t call it fascism.

Sometimes reparations is used to justify a feeding frenzy in which minority claimants simply raid the U.S. Treasury en masse while government bureaucrats facilitate a large transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to these so-called historical victims. A scandalous example of this is the Pigford case. Some ninety-one black farmers had sued the U.S. government alleging a legacy of bias against African Americans. Rather than settle the suit and pay the farmers a reasonable compensation, the Obama administration used the lawsuit to make an absurdly expensive settlement. It agreed to pay out $1.33 billion to compensate not only the ninety-one plaintiffs but also thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court. Encouraged

If it appears from the face of the [unlawful detainer] complaint that the plaintiff is an improper plaintiff, a demurer will lie. If it is not apparent from the face of the complaint, the issue must generally be raised as an affirmative defense in the answer. The fact that a plaintiff is not a proper plaintiff would appear on the face of the complaint, for example, when • The complaint states that the landlord has sold the property; or • The name of the plaintiff is not the same as the name of the landlord on the lease attached to the complaint, and the plaintiff does not allege that he or she is the successor in interest.

The problem is not covenant theology in general, but covenantal nomism in particular. Wright's primary objection to the imputation of Christ's active obedience is that it's a category mistake: "If we use the language of the law-court, it make no sense whatever to say that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or gas which can be passed across the courtroom....To imagine the defendant somehow receiving the judge's righteousness is simply a category mistake." P.25

Starting in the Clinton era and continuing through George W. Bush’s two terms, progressive activists mounted direct pressure—either in the form of public protest or lawsuits—against banks. This was aimed at intimidating banks to adopt new lending standards and also to engage the activist groups themselves in the lending process. In 1994, a young Barack Obama, recently graduated from Harvard Law School, joined two other attorneys in suing Citibank for “discriminatory lending” because it had denied home loans to several bank applicants. The case was called Selma S. Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank. Citibank denied wrongdoing, but as often happens in such situations, it settled the lawsuit to avoid litigation costs and the negative publicity. Selma Buycks-Roberson and two of her fellow plaintiffs altogether received $60,000, and Obama and his fellow lawyers received nearly a million dollars in legal fees. This was a small salvo in a massive fusillade of lawsuits filed against banks and financial institutions in the 1990s. ACORN, the most notorious of these groups, had its own ally in the Clinton administration: Hillary Clinton. (Around the same time, ACORN was also training an aspiring community activist named Barack Obama.) Hillary helped to raise money for ACORN and also for a closely allied group, the Industrial Areas Foundation. The IAF had been founded by Saul Alinsky and continued to operate as an aggressive leftist pressure group long after Alinsky’s death in 1972. Hillary lent her name to these groups’ projects and met several times with their organizers in the White House. ACORN’s efforts were also supported by progressive politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Jon Corzine, Chuck Schumer, and Harry Reid. These politicians berated the banks to make loans easier to get. “I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness,” Frank said at a September 25, 2003, hearing. “I want to roll the dice a little more.

Sistrunk had made a decision. If possible, they would commandeer the table used by the prosecution and plaintiff, the one closest to the jury, and assert themselves as the true voice of the proponents of the will. Jake Brigance would probably throw punches, but bring it on. It was time to establish proper roles, and since their client was the

The partnership is part of a flourishing industry that pairs plaintiffs’ lawyers with state attorneys general to sue companies, a collaboration that has set off a furious competition between trial lawyers and corporate lobbyists to influence these officials.

AI will bring that same monopolistic tendency to dozens of industries, eroding the competitive mechanisms of markets in the process. We could see the rapid emergence of a new corporate oligarchy, a class of AI-powered industry champions whose data edge over the competition feeds on itself until they are entirely untouchable. American antitrust laws are often difficult to enforce in this situation, because of the requirement in U.S. law that plaintiffs prove the monopoly is actually harming consumers. AI monopolists, by contrast, would likely be delivering better and better services at cheaper prices to consumers, a move made possible by the incredible productivity and efficiency gains of the technology.

no legal system is as consistently as pro-plaintiff as that of America, and that might give both sides pause. Comparative law is a two-way street. To take but one example, discussed by Michael Trebilcock, the Canadian Supreme Court has imposed damages caps for non-pecuniary losses, but when similar rules were enacted here by state legislatures, they were often struck down by state Supreme Courts. What is mandated there is prohibited here. If we are told to look to foreign law when it comes to capital punishment, then, we might also do so for the private law questions discussed in this book.

He’s the reason I became a plaintiff’s lawyer, you know. He made me promise to help people less fortunate than myself.” “He would be very proud of the man you have become, Zack.

As Martin Luther King Jr. explained back in 1965, when describing why it was far more important to engage in mass mobilizations than file lawsuits, “We’re trying to win the right to vote and we have to focus the attention of the world on that. We can’t do that making legal cases. We have to make the case in the court of public opinion.”21 King certainly appreciated the contributions of civil rights lawyers (he relied on them to get him out of jail), but he opposed the tendency of civil rights lawyers to identify a handful of individuals who could make great plaintiffs in a court of law, then file isolated cases. He believed what was necessary was to mobilize thousands to make their case in the court of public opinion. In his view, it was a flawed public consensus—not merely flawed policy—that was at the root of racial oppression.

Marshall by now knew better than to approach Houston without a plaintiff in hand. Like all great trial lawyers, Houston was a fact-specific man. Facts turned cases that moved law; no fact was as important as who sought relief.

Is Hell really scary? Are you afraid of your God? Your answer can be anything, but please calm your mind for a few minutes and think about this What would be scarier than being accountable to yourself? And you are the only observer, the only witness, the only plaintiff, the only defendant, the only defense lawyer, the only jury and the only judge of this court and there is no body, no body there to help you. there is no lies to save you there is no way to run out If you think about this everyday just for a minute I think there is no more hell for anybody just because of think... just people needs think to makes the world beautiful

Is Hell really scary? Are you afraid of your God? Your answer can be anything, but please calm your mind for a few minutes and think about this What would be scarier than being accountable to yourself? And you are the only observer, the only witness, the only plaintiff, the only defendant, the only defense lawyer, the only jury and the only judge of this court and there is nobody, nobody there to help you. there is no lies to save you there is no way to run out If you think about this everyday just for a minute I think there is no more hell for anybody just because of think... just people needs think to makes the world beautiful

Story upon this searcheth town and country to find matter against Captain Keayne about this stray sow, and got one of his witnesses to come into Salem court and to confess there that he had forsworn himself; and upon this he petitions in Sherman’s name, to this general court, to have the cause heard again, which was granted, and the best part of seven days were spent in examining of witnesses and debating of the cause; and yet it was not determined, for there being nine magistrates and thirty deputies, no sentence could by law pass without the greater number of both, which neither plaintiff nor defendant had, for there were for the plaintiff two magistrates and fifteen deputies, and for the defendant seven magistrates and eight deputies, the other seven deputies stood doubtful.

Anticipating the pain of regret if the odds don't play out as expected can impel you to play your hand prematurely. This is why a plaintiff may settle for a reduced award rather than take their chances in a court.

Had David Irving been the defendant in a case seeking to censor his lies, and had he lost, it might be argued that the loss compromised principles of free speech. But Irving was the plaintiff here. It was he who was trying to censor Lipstadt’s truth by suing her for defamation.

King Alfred’s Book of Laws, or Dooms, as set out in the existing laws of Kent, Wessex, and Mercia, attempted to blend the Mosaic code with Christian principles and old Germanic customs. He inverted the Golden Rule. Instead of “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you”, he adopted the less ambitious principle, “What ye will that other men should not do to you, that do ye not to other men”, with the comment, “By bearing this precept in mind a judge can do justice to all men; he needs no other law-books. Let him think of himself as the plaintiff, and consider what judgment would satisfy him.

You testified that your son was drafted for the NFL," Zara said, the tone of her voice changing from demanding to conversational. "Did he get his love of the sport from you?" "I played in college," the witness said. "Wide receiver. I was a lock for a top-ten draft selection until I tore a ligament and that was the end for me." "You must have caught some good ones in your time." Now her voice was all warmth and sympathy, tinged with awe. The witness's eyes grew misty. "I miss those days." Plaintiff's counsel objected on the basis of irrelevance, and the judge sustained. Zara walked back to her table and consulted her notes. Was that it? He'd been expecting some theatrics, a smoking gun, or even a witness reduced to tears. Even without any legal training, he could see her cross-examination hadn't elicited any particularly useful information, and yet she didn't seem perturbed. Zara bent down to grab something from her bag. "Hut!" She spun around and threw a foam football at the plaintiff, her shout echoing through the courtroom, freezing everyone in place. The plaintiff shot out of his seat and took two steps to the side, hands in the air. "I got it. I got it." With a jump he grabbed the football and held it up, victorious. His smile faded as he stared at the stunned crowd, clearly realizing what he'd just done. "Objection." Plaintiff's counsel glared at Zara. "What was that?" "I believe it's called a Hail Mary pass." Zara smiled at the judge. "No further questions.

When it came to beautiful women, he had always seen himself as the plaintiff, a seller wandering ineptly through a buyer’s market.

America’s laws have not been updated to track the changes in America’s monopoly landscape. Our Congress refuses to do it. Our enforcement tools are getting rusty. Our competition enforcers don’t have enough resources to effectively take on multibillion-dollar, much less trillion-dollar, companies. And America’s courts are increasingly populated by conservative judges, including on the U.S. Supreme Court, who interpret the antitrust laws so narrowly that their decisions have created a dampening effect on the ability of the government and private plaintiffs to litigate antitrust claims.

Andrew Bennet’s relatives in the Midwest, the same relatives who hadn’t spoken with him in years, were said to be sorting through the résumés of plaintiffs’ lawyers, some of whom had flown across country to pitch their services and try to convince the family that death could be an economically prosperous event.

King certainly appreciated the contributions of civil rights lawyers (he relied on them to get him out of jail), but he opposed the tendency of civil rights lawyers to identify a handful of individuals who could make great plaintiffs in a court of law, then file isolated cases. He believed what was necessary was to mobilize thousands to make their case in the court of public opinion. In his view, it was a flawed public consensus—not merely flawed policy—that was at the root of racial oppression.

if the beneficiary of the trust (the person who eventually gets the income or the assets) is different than the grantor (the person putting the money or assets into the trust), then creditors (people to whom you owe money, including plaintiffs) cannot get at the assets of the trust.

The most famous ruler of this period was Hammurabi, who lived circa 1810–1750 BCE. He is best known for the Code of Hammurabi—a set of laws inscribed on a black basalt pillar that now stands in the Louvre Museum. Hammurabi’s code specifies the rate of interest on silver at 20% and on barley at 33⅓%. What is most important about the code is not what is says but what it represents. The code is a uniform legal framework for the entire Babylonian empire. It covered everything from criminal law to family law, commercial practice to property rights. It details a range of punishments for transgressions, methods of dispute resolution, and attributions of fault for various offenses. It specifies the roles of judge, jury, witnesses, plaintiffs, and defendants. It recognizes and elaborates the rights of ownership of property, including rights to lease and rights of eminent domain. It specifies the role of the written document in a contractual obligation, the necessity of receipts, and what should be done if they do not exist. It specifies legal tender. It describes the obligations of merchants, brokers, and agents and their fiduciary duties and limits to their liabilities in case of attack or theft. It places limits on the term of debt indenture (three years). In short, it creates a comprehensive, uniform framework for commerce.

Much of what we know about the ancient Athenian financial system comes from surviving judicial orations. The courts themselves were key elements in the financial system. The Athenian court system resolved disputes between plaintiffs and defendants through trial by jury. Jurors—typically 500 at a time—were chosen randomly and sat for a day, which was the maximum length of a trial. Plaintiff and defendant represented themselves, although famous orators were sometimes engaged to compose their speeches. Speaking time was regulated by a water-clock. Jurors did not deliberate together; rather they voted, and the ruling was determined by a majority vote.1 At the end of the day, the matter was settled.

VO: The UN High Court in the Hague has agreed to hear the case of Svetlana Stringer, a woman who claims the netshow Lifejack! had no right to select her for surveillance and create a documentary about her love life and family problems without her permission. Her attorneys argue that unless the High Court makes a stand, continual blurring of the lines of privacy by the media will mean that soon no one will have a right to any private life at all. Attorneys for the American network that makes Lifejack! insist that a waiver Ms. Stringer signed several years ago to allow herself to be filmed for another program— a documentary on music education made when she was a teenager—means she has given up her right to resist surveillance. (visual: Bling Saberstrop, attorney for ICN) SABERSTROP: “UN guidelines on privacy are just that—guidelines, not laws. We consider this to be a case where the plaintiff wants to have her cake and eat it, too—privacy only when she wants it.

The judge’s massive eyebrows crept up. “Kaldar. Are you the one speaking for the plaintiff today?” “Yes, Your Honor.” “Well, shit,” Dobe said. “I guess you’re familiar with the law. You hit it over the head, set its house on fire, and got its sister pregnant.” A huge grin sparked on Kaldar’s face. “Thank you, Your Honor.

The most famous trial took place in France, in 1521. It was the trial of some Rats, which had been causing a lot of destruction. They were summoned to court by the townsfolk and were appointed a public defense counsel, a quick-witted lawyer named Bartolomeo Chassenée. When his clients failed to appear at the first hearing, Chassenée petitioned for a deferment, testifying that they lived in wide dispersal, on top of which many dangers lay in wait for them on the way to the court. He even appealed to the court to provide a guarantee that Cats belonging to the plaintiffs would not do the defendants any harm on their way to the hearing. Unfortunately, the court could not provide any such guarantee, so the case was postponed several times more. Finally, after an ardent speech by their defense counsel, the Rats were acquitted.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the plurality, rejected the Fourteenth Amendment as a basis for finding for plaintiffs, noting that the Equal Protection Clause “guarantees equal protection of the law to persons, not equal representation in government to equivalently sized groups.” The plurality opinion cited one of the leading casebooks on voting rights for the proposition that, throughout its subsequent history, “Bandemer has served almost exclusively as an invitation to litigation without much prospect of redress.”88 Justice Scalia pointed out that those who had sought relief under Bandemer had achieved nothing except to rack up substantial legal fees. The

The government paid $134 million for the swine flu vaccine program. Injured plaintiffs filed 1,604 lawsuits. By April 1985, the government had paid out $83,233,714 and spent tens of millions of dollars adjudicating and processing those claims.16 In 1987, Dr. Morris testified before Congress, “These figures give some idea of the consequences resulting from a program in which the federal government assumes liability of a product known to produce, in an indeterminate number of recipients, serious damage to health.

political conditions in Romania.”57 At the end of this multilevel dialogue between authorities, courts, and the plaintiff, Valentina Colien had successfully performed her German Volkszugehörigkeit. She was recognized as an ethnic German after convincing two courts that her entire life in Romania had revolved around her Germanness and that she had left Romania because of this ethnic identity. Even her opposition to the communist regime was supposedly derived from her being German, which for the German court had to be the prime motivation for all her actions. Remarkably, however, Colien’s Jewish background was not discussed or even referred to at any point in this court matter. The only way that it can be understood from the ruling that Colien was Jewish is from the fact that she received Israeli citizenship while in Tel Aviv. As will be discussed below, as the number of Jewish applicants for expellee cards increased, the Jewish faith and its implications for German Volkszugehörigkeit became the object of more explicit controversy.

In the second court hearing, the Bavarian Administrative Court argued that Floris had not made a Bekenntnis to German Volkstum back in Hungary. Although his parents might have been part of the “German linguistic and cultural sphere” (deutscher Sprach- und Kulturkeis)—as he claimed—and his ancestors might have come from German-speaking lands, this did not mean that they were Germans. Liberal Jews in interwar Hungary had cherished German language and culture, but, the court argued, this attitude resulted from a “cosmopolitan stance” (weltbürgerliche Haltung) and was not indicative of a person’s “conscience and will to be German and to belong to no other people.”65 In this court’s view, the plaintiff had not publicly identified himself as German. Rather, he had tried twice—once without success, then successfully—to change his German-sounding surname, Steiner, into the neutral-sounding Floris. The reasons for these actions were arguably economic (only by assuming this name could he continue using the brand name after the war, when the real Floris moved to England), yet the name change made clear that he did not value his German appearance in name. In the Bavarian court’s view, Floris’s emigration from Hungary had also been for economic reasons. Moreover, his wife, Elisabeth, was not clearly German either, even though she credibly stated that her maternal language was German and that she had been a member of the Mozart cultural association in Budapest, where she used to sing German songs and where she met her husband, with whom she always spoke German. She supposedly also lacked the Bekenntnis.66

At Richardson Richardson Boudreaux PLLC, our past success defines our continued success. When a personal injury case is filed, the first thing an insurance adjuster does is to research the attorney representing the plaintiff. The success of the attorney is one of the factors that the adjuster uses to determine how much money will go into the reserve for that case. We have obtained more than $500 million for our clients. Our largest jury verdict is $58 million.

In the anti-gun Spokane newspaper, internet comments indicated that many people had the clueless idea that Gerlach had shot the man – in the back – to stop the thief from stealing his car. One idiot wrote in defense of doing such, “That ‘inert property’ as you call it represents a significant part of a man’s life. Stealing it is the same as stealing a part of his life. Part of my life is far more important than all of a thief’s life.” Analyze that statement. The world revolves around this speaker so much that a bit of his life spent earning an expensive object is worth “all of (another man’s) life.” Never forget that, in this country, human life is seen by the courts as having a higher value than what those courts call “mere property,” even if you’re shooting the most incorrigible lifelong thief to keep him from stealing the Hope Diamond. A principle of our law is also that the evil man has the same rights as a good man. Here we have yet another case of a person dangerously confusing “how he thinks things ought to be” with “how things actually are.” As a rule of thumb, American law does not justify the use of deadly force to protect what the courts have called “mere property.” In the rare jurisdiction that does appear to allow this, ask yourself how the following words would resonate with a jury when uttered by plaintiff’s counsel in closing argument: “Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant has admitted that he killed the deceased over property. How much difference is there in your hearts between the man who kills another to steal that man’s property, and one who kills another to maintain possession of his own? Either way, he ended a human life for mere property!

When the last sad plaintiff notes rang out,

Now, in cross-examination, the witnesses Asquith, George, Grey, Simon, Runciman, and indeed nearly all the plaintiffs, have confessed that they have been guilty from time to time of legislation, or proposals for legislation, of which the main purpose was to make people do something which they did not wish to do, or prevent people from doing something they did wish to do. Few of them could point to an item in their legislative programmes which had any other purpose, and, with the single exception of Mr. Haddock, they have no legislation to suggest of which the purpose is to allow people to do something which they cannot do already. On the contrary, it appears, they are as anxious as any other party in Parliament to make rules and regulations for the eating, drinking, sleeping, and breathing of the British citizen... Mr. Haddock's own programme is simple: (a) to propose no legislation unless its purpose is to allow people to do what they like, and (b) to support no legislation whose purpose is to stop people from doing what they like. "Which is the Liberal Party?

King Alfred’s Book of Laws, or Dooms, as set out in the existing laws of Kent, Wessex, and Mercia, attempted to blend the Mosaic code with Christian principles and old Germanic customs. He inverted the Golden Rule. Instead of “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you”, he adopted the less ambitious principle, “What ye will that other men should not do to you, that do ye not to other men”, with the comment, “By bearing this precept in mind a judge can do justice to all men; he needs no other law-books. Let him think of himself as the plaintiff, and consider what judgment would satisfy him.” The King, in his preamble, explained modestly that “I have not dared to presume to set down in writing many laws of my own, for I cannot tell what will meet with the approval of our successors.” The Laws of Alfred, continually amplified by his successors, grew into that body of customary law administered by the shire and hundred courts which, under the name of the Laws of St Edward (the Confessor), the Norman kings undertook to respect, and out of which, with much manipulation by feudal lawyers, the Common Law was founded.

Thalberg rose in all his craven majesty. Speaking for the assembled, he said the plaintiff and her attorney were making a grave mistake. The diary, in addition to creating a scandal devastating to the industry, would probably cause her to lose the case and the child too. They urged her to drop it and seek an out-of-court settlement.

Lower Tribunals.—The lowest order of Hebrew tribunal was the Court of Three, composed of judges selected by the litigants themselves. The plaintiff chose one member, the defendant selected another, and these two chose a third.

Not the law, Mr Smith, nor even the custom.’ Tabitha leaned forward into the candle-light, the dark silk of her dress gleaming. ‘Our grandees go unmolested, I assure you. Mijnheer Philipse can walk up Broad Street without a soul tugging his sleeve and asking what’s in his pockets; Mr De Lancey can rule in the court without the plaintiff saying, “Now, sir, what’s this about the block for lease by Rutgers’ Farm I hear you’re buying?” Mr Livingston can take his pinch of snuff in the Black Horse without the waiter asking, “Wheat or oats for you, sir, this sowing season?

The average doctor in a high-risk practice like surgery or obstetrics is sued about once every six years. Seventy percent of the time, the suit is either dropped by the plaintiff or won by the doctor in court. But the cost of defense is high, and when doctors lose, the average jury verdict is half a million dollars. General

plaintiff’s

He said his father dealt with people ‘on their merits’ but ‘to some extent de haut en bas’; and, as Leon Edel, who edited Wilson’s papers, has pointed out, the propensity to cross-question literary plaintiffs and to sit in Olympian judgment on them were Wilson’s most marked characteristics as a critic.1 But he also got from his father a passionate love of truth and an obstinate determination to find it. This in the end was his salvation.

Cicero was right – he said that when you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.

With deft dialectical (and literary) skill Plato, whenever necessary, abstracts and rarifies mortal beauty into a matter of proportion, suitability, and truth until it becomes “that other beauty,” which conveniently resembles the nature of the good, which is also these things. But in the process of abstraction—in trying to find the face of beauty beyond the world of experience—what is lost is exactly that which makes the beautiful so. Indeed, whenever we chance to glimpse at beauty in the course of life, it never appears with a plaintiff or veil, but always in an easy grandeur.

Giving judgment," he read, "the learned deputy observed that the plaintiff had alleged that Mrs. Gallop was a very difficult customer to fit. Having seen Mrs. Gallop in the witness-box he could well believe it.

ALTHOUGH writers and publishers like to grumble about the proliferation of libel lawsuits in this country, few would seriously propose that anything be done to reverse the trend. The Ayatollah’s death sentence on Salman Rushdie brings into relief the primitive feeling that lies behind every libel suit, and makes the writer only too grateful for the mechanism the law provides for transforming the displeased subject’s impulse to kill him into the move civilized aim of extracting large sums of money from him. Although the money is rarely collected—most libel suits end in defeat for the plaintiff or in a modest settlement—the lawsuit itself functions as a powerful therapeutic agent, ridding the subject of his feelings of humiliating powerlessness and restoring to him his cheer and amour propre. From the lawyer who takes him into his care he immediately receives the relief that a sympathetic hearing of one’s grievances affords. Conventional psychotherapy would soon veer off into an unpleasurable examination of the holes in one’s story, but the law cure never ceases to be gratifying; in fact, what the lawyer says and writes on his client’s behalf is gratifying beyond the latter’s wildest expectations. The rhetoric of advocacy law is the rhetoric of the late-night vengeful brooding which in life rarely survives the skeptical light of morning but in a lawsuit becomes inscribed, as if in stone, in the bellicose documents that accrue while the lawsuit takes its course, and proclaims with every sentence “I am right! I am right! I am right!” On the other side, meanwhile, the same orgy of self-justification is taking place. The libel defendant, after an initial anxious moment (we all feel guilty of something, and being sued stirs the feeling up), comes to see, through the ministrations of his lawyer-therapist, that he is completely in the right and has nothing to fear. Of pleasurable reading experiences there may be none greater than that afforded by a legal document written on one’s behalf. A lawyer will argue for you as you could never argue for yourself, and, with his lawyer’s rhetoric, give you a feeling of certitude that you could never obtain for yourself from the language of everyday discourse. People who have never sued anyone or been sued have missed a narcissistic pleasure that is not quite like any other.