Video for 1st-Year Law Students

 

"How to Read a Case" with UVA Law Professor Anne Coughlin

I recently listened to this law lecturer from the University of Virginia on how to read a case, in this instance, PEOPLE v. BOWEN, 10 Mich.App. 1, 158 N.W.2d 794 (Ct. of Appeals, 1968). This video can be a fruitful lesson for any of us who care about the current state of law. Watch and listen to this lecture and think it through for yourself.

Here's my take on it:

It is obvious that the professor who is lecturing strives to teach with head and heart. And her style is less dry than some typical law professors. It is also obvious that she has been thoroughly inculcated into the standard case method of law learning. She admires, unwittingly, how the appellate courts manufacture law precedent, piling higher and deeper as they go; she is accepting of their "wisdom from on high" with a cross between awe and a contained respect. That is, she presents as an exemplar of the current System without having a clue about the essential nature and importance of the common law, specifically the centrality of the jury in the process. Instead, she drills down on "how to read a case," worthy in and of itself, but in so doing she disregards the spirit of what the law is, in the context of serving the immediate justice needs of those who seek litigation as their remedy.

As I said above, her heart and head are in it, but her soul is not; her soul is not informing her of the critical purpose of the law as protector of the people's God-given rights to live in a freedom-state of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Instead she stands for the law as being a "juridical overseer," administered by a corps of specially-trained professionals and "experts" in jurisprudential definitions and procedures. And while there is a value to order and to keeping track of precedents and the facts upon which they proceed, over-emphasis on that aspect of law can and does overwhelm the justiciability of individual plaintiffs who seek redress for unlawful wrongs in each "instant" case that is heard.

Parsing out elements of common law-sourced crimes, such as attempted theft or larceny, including both the mens rea and actus reus components, is also a worthy task, especially in view of the fact that she is dissecting an appellate opinion (for it is only appellate opinions that set precedent for particular state or federal circuit jurisdictions). Still, the sacredness of law is to be found more at the trial level, where a proper jury metes out justice not just according to the facts of a particular case but also does justice to the supposed law governing those facts; in a trial by jury, a jury of one's peers sits, listens and weighs their verdicts as much for the plaintiff or defendant as it does on the System itself. And if the System is elevated as "untouchable" as in the modern, corporate courts' notion that juries are not there to weigh the law but only the facts, then this law professor is guilty of not properly teaching real American law; she is teaching the law of Babylon used by corporate merchants and tyrants to eviscerate justice by denying an occasional jury nullification of law which true freedom requires—freedom from government overreach and meddling in the hard-won liberties of man. This over-arching factor must always be kept in mind when trying to strike a balance between law's emancipatory function versus its regulatory/enforcement arm. 

A reading of the 1968 case adds to the understanding and analysis. You might be tempted (as I was) to leave the details to law students and future attorneys; I'd rather emphasize the socio-cultural context. That year, 1968, was the year of the Democrat convention in Chicago (right next-door to Michigan), the convention that turned into a riot; it was the year RFK and MLK, Jr. bit-the-dust; five years after JFK was publicly executed and the chickens had come home to roost with total impunity; when Communism was gaining the upper hand through the depravity of the Aquarian Conspiracy, sold to hippies as sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; when law and order was (rightly or wrongly) becoming hamstrung and more and more impotent by the calculated use of "technicalities" in courtroom dramas; when the old, stiff order was going down and being replaced by liberal biases with their virtue-signaling pap.

Courts are swayed by the temperament of the times; bad laws, just as with bad precedent, result in bad justice being done in courts. The case-in-point is from 1968 and the lecture was presented in 2015. The trajectory of societal discord and culture-war dissonance has continued to worsen considerably up to 2023. Imagine how the “woke” court personnel now controlling the legal levers of power are currently conducting matters of "justice" <=.it's not truth, justice OR the American way. Non merci!

Instead of placing faith in so-called experts latching onto the whims of society, better to place faith in the native intelligence of juries in multitudes of court cases conducted (hopefully) impartially day-after-day across the land. As originally designed, the latter option does a better job of holding criminals and other bad folks at bay while also keeping watch over nanny states who consider themselves superior to the common man and woman.

Those of us, such as myself, who still hold dear to the real common law principles—the law in America at its founding and for about the next hundred after—might weep bitterly to watch and hear how today’s attorneys are now being processed. Those who know our real history are clamoring for the common law’s return, law that puts the people in the center of trying cases instead of cases being run by a controlled fiefdom of state-aligned judges and attorneys culled from the British Accreditation Registry (B.A.R.), who merely act out a fanciful façade of justice, while operating a dastardly, unjust commercial enterprise on behalf of the System and their own self-interests.