Re:Appeals Court: Judge Can't Ignore the Supreme Court to Ke...
by dragonwriter on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @01:07PM
(#15340558)
> Not a lawyer and haven't read that many rulings, but this one looked pretty normal and not that "sarcasm-oozing" to me.
Yeah, so, it's hard to detect variation from the norm if you have no basis for understanding where the baseline and range of normal variation is.
While not a lawyer, I've studied law and read lots of court rulings, and the excerpt provided is pretty high on the list of the most condescending rejections of a lower court decision I've seen.
> Sometimes they need to use a "common meaning" of a term rather than a legal one, and so they might cite a dictionary.
Citing, for the same common term, both a 1911 general-use dictionary and the 1891 first edition of Black's Law (other than for a time-specific meaning of a term in a turn-of-the-century law), on top on the “this is a noun, this is an adjective that modifies the noun” bit, is pretty much saying “English...it's a thing you might want to look into.”
Yeah, so, it's hard to detect variation from the norm if you have no basis for understanding where the baseline and range of normal variation is.
While not a lawyer, I've studied law and read lots of court rulings, and the excerpt provided is pretty high on the list of the most condescending rejections of a lower court decision I've seen.
> Sometimes they need to use a "common meaning" of a term rather than a legal one, and so they might cite a dictionary.
Citing, for the same common term, both a 1911 general-use dictionary and the 1891 first edition of Black's Law (other than for a time-specific meaning of a term in a turn-of-the-century law), on top on the “this is a noun, this is an adjective that modifies the noun” bit, is pretty much saying “English...it's a thing you might want to look into.”