An amazing thing happened today. Judge Joe Brown visited my school. Now, I am not one easily swayed by celebrity, but this guy was awe inspiring. Unfortunately, this was not for good reasons. The guy who introduced the Judge really focused on his experience as a minority lawyer and his ability to provide insight into the somewhat recent phenomenon of small claims courts. Judge Joe Brown, on the other hand decided to focus on other aspects of the law. And soon enough, other aspects of anything at all. Allow me to illustrate:
The judge started off by really emphasizing that the law was entirely a matter of appealing to a jury. He said that the jury was the standard we had to keep in mind at every step of litigation, and that a major factor that would make or break our careers would be our ability to relate to a jury. He practiced in the South, so his stories on this topic mostly concerned emphasizing church. One case in particular concerned a murder and the prosecution's key witness was, and I quote "a lady of the night, or as I call her, a ho." His key witness was a young man whose story was not very good. Four of the five people tried in the matter were found guilty, and his client was the only one to go free. You know what he did? He had his witness's father show up in court every day in a nice suit, and near the end of the testimony asked him if he could identify that man in the back of the court room, to which his witness responded "of course, that's my dad, pastor 'such-and-such.'" The whole jury was moved right there. In his closing, Brown said he sat in the witness chair and told the jury "This judge is going to give you instructions, and he's going to tell you to think about the witness's demeanor and reliability into account. So who ya gonna believe? The pastor's boy or the ho?" And he won his case.
Another story involved him grabbing all the evidence and walking over to the jury and saying "I'm going to cast this all up into the heavens, and let God keep whatever he wants." Sure enough, it all came back down to earth, and one woman jumped up with an "Amen!" and ended up hanging the jury, getting him his retrial.
What this had to do with being a minority or judge of small claims court, I'm not quite sure, but that's where the vague association with the courtroom ended. What followed was a solid forty-five minutes of rambling rants about the government. His segues were mind-boggling. My notes pick up about ten minutes after his courtroom stories with a series of question marks. It was at this point I realized we weren't getting back to the topic of lawyering any time soon. Under the ruse of issue-spotting, he changed the topic to the Middle East. Something about how as lawyers we would have to learn how to get at what was actually important. He said that England had gone bankrupt paying gold for sugar it wanted for its tea. For some reason, this included an affected British accent. Let me just say, until you've heard Judge Joe Brown's southern black voice give way to a British impersonation, you haven't experienced all life has to offer. Then he went from that to the fact that England's way of recouping economically in its search for tea was to get people addicted to opium, plant opium in Afghanistan, and ensure their subsequent power over the Afghan government by keeping it destabilized.
Naturally, the topic was then transitioned into a discussion of our involvement in Kuwait and Bush's interest in oil. He asked for questions soon after. We were all speechless. I certainly had no idea what I had just witnessed. Not wanting to let a minute go by without hearing himself talk, Judge Brown supplied his own question in the form of "Let me give you first year students some advice. I can do twenty times the research you guys can do in half the time it takes you to do it." He then launched into a description of photocopying certain key pages I didn't bother remembering because, you know, I have this thing called the internet. He concluded this segment with "this gives you more time to be relaxing. You have to be careful who you have an affair with, though." His second solicitation for questions was met with more stunned silence. One of the representatives for the organization that was hosting him raised her hand.
"Can you tell us a bit about the role of the small claims courts and your experience there?" You know, that thing we thought we were paying you to come do in the first place? He started almost on topic by giving us the story of how the small claims court came to exist in the United States. After filling us in about that, he said "lots of idiots file stupid claims in small claims. It was my job to beat them down." He then ranted about the quality of the education system. The reason we have so many idiots filling up his court is because of these stupid standardized tests that teachers have to teach to. I don't necessarily disagree, but oh boy was that ever not what the question was asking! After emphasizing his role as the man in charge of the courtroom, he told a story about how Hollywood wanted to take over, but because he was a judge he retained control of the program. They apparently invited a high-ranking judicial figure to try and intimidate him, but that lady was a girl he recruited to attend his alma mater and subsequently dated, so they just kissed on the mouth in greeting and Hollywood's plan failed. At this point there were multiple people just laughing uncontrollably, while the rest of us just looked around with various degrees of skepticism and confusion on our faces. And then his time was up and we left. What a weird experience.
Thanks for reading! I realized this was long enough to be a post of its own, so I'll get on with the rest of my life stuff immediately.
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