I was asked for advice about a new lawyer who would like to be a great plaintiff’s trial lawyer. In addition to providing articles and advice, I thought the ideas of my late friend Gerry Spence would be helpful as well. I didn’t find any examples of his actually giving that advice to an individual, so what follows is what I think he might have advised. This is an outline version of what he taught, written in his voice and…
After two weeks the jury trial I was involved in was ended by the judge declaring a mistrial. With over a hundred motions before trial and multiple motions during trial it finally just was stopped as a mercy killing. The judge decided that he should not have allowed evidence about the driver’s past driving and criminal history and that as a result he felt he had to grant a mistrial. The entire experience reminded me of a Kafka novel and and the…
The book, Secret lives of the Supreme Court by Robert Schnakenberg has some interesting facts about the people who have been appointed to the U.S. Supreme court. As Robert Ingersoll once said: “We must remember that we have to make judges out of men, and that by being made judges their prejudices are not diminished and their intelligence is not increased.” Here are some examples of that fact from the book. Justice James Clark McReynolds was the Archie Bunker of…