By
Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.
Ph.D., University of Cambridge, England
M.B.A., University of Michigan Business School
D.E.A., La Sorbonne, Paris
Judicial Discipline Reform
New York City
http://www.Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org
Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net , DrRCordero@Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org , CorderoRic@yahoo.com
The link to this article is:
http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL2/DrRCordero_research_documents&sources.pdf
Dear Advocates of Honest Judiciaries,
A. Finding pertinent quotations from judges’ decisions
1. You can easily cite quotations from court decisions like those that you read in any judge-written decision and attorney-written brief: You do law research in the books, called Reporters or Reports, that collect those decisions.
2. In their table of contents, they organize all the subjects of law alphabetically, like a dictionary, or chronologically, according to the procedural steps from filing a case in a trial court to enforcing a final decision from a court of appeals.
3. The subjects are organized under headings and subheadings, each of which is identified with a number, all of which form “the key number system”. With that number, you can find the same subject in any book of the same publisher, regardless of the main subject of the book; e.g., Witness k185 deals with the same subject, namely Attorney-client privilege, no matter where it appears in publications by Westlaw (see next).
4. You will be amazed by how easy it is to find quotations in paragraphs the length on average of this paragraph and frequently called headnotes. Those headnotes contain the gist of what judges have written on that very specific law subject, identified by its “key number”.
5. Those Reporters are published for decisions by the judges in the Federal Judiciary as well as each state judiciary –judiciaries are also referred to as jurisdictions-. The two main publishers are the following. Before clicking on the links below be aware that you only want to see the picture of their Reporters and Reports and read the description of their contents. Do not mind the price: you are not expected to buy any of them. They are sets of scores of volumes, not just one book. Thus, reporters are so expensive that only libraries and law firms can afford them.
a. Thomson-Reuters Westlaw:
2) https://store.legal.thomsonreuters.com/law-products/search?r=13001&s=KEYWORDSEARCH&q=reporter >left panel under the heading –Jurisdiction.
3) The same law research principle described above applies to each particular subject of the law, e.g., the all-important area of court procedure, that is, what parties and judges do in court and in what order; https://store.legal.thomsonreuters.com/law-products/Legal-Encyclopedias/Federal-Practice-and-Procedure-Wright–Miller/p/100028918?trkcode=recsbserp&trktype=internal&FindMethod=recs
b. LexisNexis:
1) All jurisdictions: https://store.lexisnexis.com/categories/shop-by-jurisdiction
2) e.g., the Supreme Court: https://store.lexisnexis.com/categories/shop-by-jurisdiction/national-194/us-supreme-court-reports-lawyers-edition-cd47dvd-skuSKU7291/details
B. Learning by doing and doing it methodically: do not skip any step!
6. To begin your law research with an enlightening visual and tactile impression you could go to a still open public library with a law department or venture into the library of a law school or association of lawyers, called a bar association, and ask for permission to take a look at the Reporters. But due to Covid-19, those libraries are likely to be closed. Call them and find out.
7. Hence, plan B: You get that experience digitally by going to the websites of public and law school libraries that offer access to legal databases online, including those of Westlaw and LexisNexis, as opposed to their bookstores.
8. Today you can query those databases using natural language as opposed to Boolean operators, such as AND, OR, AND NOT. For instance, your write in the search box: “Can a landlord evict a tenant who cannot pay rent because he lost his job due to the Covid-19 lockdown?”
a. New York Public Library Science, Industry, Business, and Law (NYPL-SIBL), https://browse.nypl.org/iii/encore/search/C__Swestlaw__Orightresult__U?searched_from=header_search×tamp=1593550493317&lang=eng
b. The Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School, https://www.law.cornell.edu/lii/get_the_law
9. The returns to your queries will contain headnotes, which are in essence the quotations that you are searching for. If you click the appropriate settings, your returns will contain the whole decisions of the judges as well as an abundance of other very useful information. Pay attention to detail and you will be richly rewarded. Practice, practice, practice for free there until you become familiarized with doing law research on a legal database online. Thereafter, if need be, you can take advantage of the 7-day free trial of Westlaw, https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/forms/try-westlaw.
10. For more information on LexisNexis, go to page OL2:1066 in my 2-volume professional study* † of judges and their judiciaries, titled and downloadable for free thus:
Exposing Judges’ Unaccountability and Consequent Riskless Wrongdoing:
Pioneering the news and publishing field of judicial unaccountability reporting* †
* Volume 1: http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf >all prefixes:# up to page OL:393
† Volume 2: http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL2/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates2.pdf >from page OL2:394
a. Download the volume files using MS Edge, Firefox, or Chrome; it may happen that Internet Explorer only downloads a blank page.
b. Open the downloaded files using Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is available for free at https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat/pdf-reader.html.
c. In each downloaded file, go to the Menu bar >View >Navigation Panels >Bookmarks panel and use its bookmarks, which make navigating to the contents’ numerous(* †>blue references) very easy.
C. Doing research only to be wiped out by judges: the alternative
11. In those two volumes of my study you will find an enormous amount of information about how the courts work. Click the binocular icon on the menu bar of each volume. In the search box, enter keywords that must appear in the text of the answer; this is not the type of box where to ask queries in natural language or with Boolean operators.
12. In that study you will find out what is so much more important to you than a nice quotation from a court decision: You will find out why a person like you, without a lawyer and thus called pro se, does not stand a chance of winning in court.
13. There you and scores of millions of other pro ses are wiped out by judges, who are unaccountable so that for their gain and convenience they risklessly abuse their power. Indeed, former Chief Circuit Judge Richard Posner of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit wrote belatedly: “Many judges are hostile to pro se’s, seeing them as a kind of ‘trash’ not even worth the courts’ time” (†>OL2:932).
14. This means that if you do not know even where to find quotations from judges’ decisions, you have no business going to court as a pro se, never mind attempting to write a legal brief for the court and the opposing party. Here applies the legal aphorism: He who cannot do the least cannot do the more.
a. That aphorism applies to judges too: You will find below the references to the mathematical demonstration showing that it is impossible for judges or their clerks to read anything but a minimal number of briefs, regardless of who writes them. But if in addition they are written by pro ses, the chances that the judges will read them are practically nil. The judges have doomed your law research and writing effort and expense to be wasteful from the outset.
b. Quotations are not the equivalent, let alone a substitute for, legal argument. If you do not know how to “craft an argument”, even a string of quotations will not do it for you.
c. A quotation is only useful to support a legal argument. It is only meaningful if you know its context. To learn that context you need to do a lot of research even if you are a lawyer. You cannot skip three years of law school, where you learn that context, and simply jump to a Reporter to snatch some quotations and cobble together a string of them. You cannot improvise yourself as a lawyer after spending a few hours on a legal database online. It is intrinsically a folly.
d. The judges know it. Yet, they require the production of a brief with the inevitable incurrence of expenditure of effort, money, and time; take the pro ses’ court filing fees;…and DIT their briefs: Dump them in the Trash. It is the equivalent of a casino taking a bet despite knowing that the odds of the bettor winning are illusory. In that vein, judges’ conduct gives rise to the following causes of action and legal considerations:
1) concealment of a material fact
2) abuse of superior knowledge
3) intentional frustration of reasonable expectations
4) misleading advertisement of adjudicatory services
5) fraud in the inducement and the performance
6) breach of contract
7) invidious discrimination against a class of people, the pro ses
8) intentional infliction of emotional distress
9) denial of equal protection of the law relative to those parties whose briefs judges read
10) deprivation of due process by failing to “hear” the party whose brief is not read
11) judges’ unaccountability as the means for their abuse of power committed for the motive of grabbing gain and convenience at every opportunity upon a party taking someone or being taken to court.
15. Avoiding such waste and abuse foretold warrants the alternative: It is in your interest to read in this volume, which sets a strategy for forming a movement to expose judges’ abuse of power; jointly demand compensation for their victims, and bring about reform of the judicial and legal system through transformative change where We the People, the masters of all public servants, including judicial ones, hold them accountable for their performance and liable to compensate the victims of their abuse of power(†>OL2:1133); https://judicial-discipline-reform.org/OL2/DrRCordero-Talkshow_hosts_coalition.pdf.
a. If you want to bring about change, you have to do things differently; otherwise, Einstein’s aphorism applies: “Doing things the same way while expecting a different result is the hallmark of irrationality”. This is so because it betrays ignorance of, or disregard for, a fundamental law of both the physical and the human worlds: cause and effect. This is in harmony with Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion: bodies in motion tend to keep moving in the same direction and at the same speed; and bodies at rest tend to keep at rest until a force impels them to move. The force that you need to change your course of action comes from KNOWLEDGE [, which] IS POWER; and from the application of dynamic analysis of harmonious and conflicting interests(†>OL2:593¶¶15-16; dcc:8¶11).
16. I respectfully ask that you help make that article go viral by sharing, posting, and emailing it as proposed. See also the latest article posted to http://www.Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org
17. Life is a give and take. I have given. Now you can give back…and your giving will be in your own interest and that of your friends, relatives, and the rest of your fellow members of We the People.
D. Every meaningful cause needs resources for its advancement; none can be continued, let alone advanced, without money
Put your money
where your outrage at abuse and
passion for justice are.
Donate
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Dare trigger history!(†>OL2:1125)‡…and you may enter it.
https://judicial-discipline-reform.org/OL2/DrRCordero_Reuters_judges_investigation.pdf
