Sotomayor should be swiftly dismissed on the basis of her manifest incompetence

Sotomized: Dumbing Down the Court

By Joy Tiz
Wednesday, July 15, 2009

At the beginning of the film, The Paper Chase, the somber professor tells his classroom of first year law students that they would have to learn to think like lawyers. He meant the need to cultivate the skill of analytical thinking that is required to understand legal issues. Understanding basic contract or tort law isn’t the great struggle in law school. Figuring out how to spot an issue, understand the rule of law and apply it to a given set of facts is the mission. Next is grappling with the Weltschmerz of not being the smartest one in the room anymore. Core courses are commonly studied for a year; the art of legal analysis starts on day one and doesn’t end until the bar exam.

Presumably, when presented with a dispute, a capable lawyer knows how to ferret out the actual issues involved. Much of what people want to sue each other over is, legally, nonsensical. Any litigator in practice will tell you about the equanimity required with clients who don’t understand how to articulate an actual point to their stories of being done wrong. It works like this: you hit my parked car and damaged it. I want you to pay for the damage. You don’t want to pay for the damage. The issue would be the legal question we want the court to settle: are you responsible to pay for damages to my car?

Perhaps you and I have a long personal history and I am convinced you hit my car on purpose. Now the lawyers have to figure out if this new fact gives rise to yet another issue. Is there a law that is applicable to intentional property damage rather than simple negligence? Is this new fact provable in a court of law?

If you want to see how imperative adequate legal reasoning skills are in court, spend a few hours at your local small claims court. Then spend some time in a real courtroom with actual litigators. The lay litigants will be all over the map, trying to drag in all kinds of extraneous contentions, “Well yes, he did give me all my money back but he was so RUDE I should get something for my emotional distress!â€