27th August 2021
The primary purpose of a reasoned court judgment is not to be a historical document.
The primary purpose of a reasoned court judgment is for the here-and-now: it is a practical document to explain why the court made a particular order (or did not make an order) or otherwise disposed of the claim or matter before it.
To the extent to which that judgment contains anything of general interest to future generations of historians is (or should be) incidental
Yet.
Every so often there are judgments that you hope will speak to the ages.
Judgments to tell future generations about things in the here-and-now that they may not otherwise understand.
And the judgment handed down recently by Honorable Linda V. Parker of the United States district court for the eastern district of Michigan is such a judgment.
It is a judgment for the ages.
It is a judgment that (one hopes) will tell future generations that the American courts of our time had not gone completely mad.
It is a long judgment – but once you start reading it is compelling, and you are well into it before you realise.
The first paragraph is itself a banger:
And then it gets better, and better.
In essence: it sets out in readable detail how pro-Trump attorneys deceived the court again and again, and it sets out why that was again and again wrong.
The flavour of the judgment can be gained in this outstanding Twitter thread:
Yesterday, a federal judge in Michigan did something extraordinary & important.
Yes, she penalized Trump's election attorneys for their conduct filing a lawsuit to have Michigan's 2020 election results thrown out.
But she did something bigger:
Took the suit seriously.
—>
— (((Charles Fishman))) (@cfishman) August 26, 2021
Click on and read the judgment here – and (if it is the right word) enjoy.
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You really should get on stream with Mike “QuestAuthority” Dunford for nerd shenanigans (and some law talk)
Not my medium, I am afraid
Wow! A banger indeed – the ‘pro-Trump attorneys’ even get sent back to Law School….
This must be part of the background material for a movie called ‘The Big Lie’. At this point in the story, of course, we don’t know if these numpties are going to be disbarred, but I think they deserve to be. The judge needs whatever the legal equivalent of a Pullizer prize is for authorship and patience.
PS Page 101 is pretty good too.
LMAO she sent them back to school to learn election law, that’s one hell of a come down. I suspect that there will be legal challenges to the debarring.
Apparently the Donald J. Trump Frequent Filer Strangler Fraud Vine (ignoramus robustus) cannot survive outside the Twitterhothouse. Sad.
Nice to see the judge robustly engage with the attempt to characterise lying as the reasonable exercise of First Amendment rights, noting that the correct functioning of the courts requires such rights to be circumscribed (what else is an oath?). “Alternative facts” are a dreadful malignancy anywhere, including those coyly attempted by advancing a great pile of suspicions as amounting to evidence, so this stinging riposte is a joy:
Plaintiffs’ counsel may not bury their heads in the sand and thereafter make affirmative proclamations about what occurred above ground. In such cases, ignorance is not bliss—it is sanctionable.
P101 – “that they actively refused to investigate or question with the requisite level of professional skepticism—and this refusal was to ensure that the evidence conformed with the predetermined narrative (a narrative that has had dangerous and violent consequences)”. Shuuurly we don’t have any of that sort of thing here.
Professional skepticism – there looks to be something that would save us all a great deal of time and trouble and injustice.
Will be interesting to see if the lawyers criticised do indeed hand back the money.
“Plaintiffs’ lawyers argue that no attorney can be sanctioned whose name appeared only in typewritten form; that no attorney besides Plaintiffs’ local counsel has appeared or signed a document filed in this matter; and that the Court lacks jurisdiction to sanction any attorney who did not personally appear or sign a
document filed in this matter. …
Yet, the local attorneys assert that, although they signed the filings, they did not prepare them and thus should not be responsible for them.”
Hahaha.
But no doubt Trump and his followers will sell this as Honorable Linda V. Parker being a nasty, nasty person, spewing fake news, a witch hunter, a woman (what can you expect) with a grudge, and attempting to overturn what Trump succeeded in making the greatest democracy in the world.