Posted on 08/03/2005 9:28:51 AM PDT by SwinneySwitch
do the right thing? fine and deport the illegals posthumously, fine and deport any family member that shows up for the case, and fine the lawyer for wasting the judges time, then disbar him?
My hatred for the corrupt US lawyer industry knows no bounds.
Not only are trailers not intended to carry people, most states make it illegal to use them for that purpose. Try driving an ordinary camper trailer down the road with people in it and see what happens when the trooper pulls you over.
Ya never know:
The Common Law Of Texas
Tune: The Yellow Rose of Texas
They buy their bourbon by the case, and never shun the cup,
They ride around in Cadillacs, and smash each other up.
And when they litigate the case, it's the weirdest ever seen,
Because the poor benighted courts try to follow Leon Green.
It's the damndest jurisdiction
This country ever saw,
It has the queerest people,
The most peculiar law.
They have some nuts in loway,
And some in Tennessee
But the common law of Texas is
A thing of mysteree.
They enter into arguments, and then they have a fight,
They call each other dirty names, and broad on it all night,
Then lie in wait for sixteen hours behind an old rail fence,
And shoot the fellow in the back, but it's all in self-defense.
It's the damndest jurisdiction
This country ever knew,
And all its jurisprudence
Is twisted like a screw.
Connecticut's a crazy place,
And so is Arkansaw,
But Texas has, of all the states,
The most peculiar law.
They raise an oil well derrick in the city hall front yard,
And when the damn thing blows to hell they take it mighty hard.
Petroleum and rocks and mud are strewn all o'er the sod,
It makes a most unsightly mess, but it's just an act of God.
It's the damndest jurisdiction
This country ever had,
It has ten thousand cases.
And all of them are bad,
Oh, Minnesota's off the beam,
And so is Idaho,
But Texas has the wildest law
Upon this earth below.
A widow seeks indemnity upon a policee,
And she recovers double, with her attorney's fee,
For when she loaded arsenic into her husband's beans,
The late lamented met his death by accidental means.
It's the damndest jurisdiction
There is from coast to coast,
There's crazy law all over,
But Texas has the most.
They're lunatics in Michigan,
Also in Delaware,
But the common law of Texas
Will really curl your hair.
A loyal son of Texas goes out upon a spree,
And perpetrates six murders, some rape and burglaree;
He ends upon the gallows--it's a proper end, of course-
But the reason that they hang him is, the bastard stole a horse.
It's the damndest jurisdiction
In the entire U.S.A.,
And what will happen next there
No man alive can say.
They do strange things in Maryland,
Likewise in Oregon,
But Texas has the wildest law
That e'er the sun shone on.
They as the jury questions, which may number twenty score,
Instructions that they give them take seven days or more,
And when the case comes on appeal the record grows and grows,
And what the last opinion holds, alas, God only knows.
It's the damndest jurisdiction
Upon this planet sad,
It's whole judicial process
Is absolutely mad.
There's schizophrenia in New York,
Also in Illinois,
But the common law of Texas is
A psychiatric joy
There used to be a concept in law called "contributory negligence," where if someone is injured and it's at least partly their own fault, the best to hope for would be a severely reduced award, if any. One instance is what happened when I lived on a grassy hillside and some guests were running in the rain as they left. One of them slipped and fell on her foot, breaking her ankle. When she talked about suing, I told her that it was wrong to assume that I should be held responsible for her decision to run on a wet, slick grassy slope. She eventually agreed.
So now a manufacturer might be found liable for someone's placing people in a refrigerated trailer, locking it from the outside, and those people letting them do it. Has the concept of contributory negligence been completely cast aside? Lawyers became sleazy about the same time they were allowed to advertise.
BEYOND THE PALE
[Q] From Jon Pearce: “Any idea where beyond the pail comes from and what it means?”
[A] That’s a common misspelling these days because the word that really belongs in the expression has gone out of use except in this one case. The expression is properly beyond the pale. That word pale has nothing to do with the adjective for something light in colour except that both come from Latin roots. The one referring to colour is from the Latin verb pallere, to be pale, whilst our one is from palus, a stake.
A pale is an old name for a pointed stake driven into the ground to form part of a fence and—by obvious extension—to a barrier made of such stakes, a fence (our modern word paling is from the same source, as are pole and impale). This meaning has been around in English since the fourteenth century. By 1400 it had taken on various figurative senses, such as a defence, a safeguard, a barrier, an enclosure, or a limit beyond which it was not permissible to go.
In particular, it was used to describe various defended enclosures of territory inside other countries. For example, the English pale in France in the fourteenth century was the territory of Calais, the last English possession in that country. The best-known modern example is the Russian Pale, between 1791 up to the Revolution in 1917, which were specified provinces and districts within which Russian Jews were required to live. Another famous one is the Pale in Ireland, that part of the country over which England had direct jurisdiction—it varied from time to time, but was an area of several counties centred on Dublin. The first mention of the Irish Pale is in a document of 1446–7. Though there was an attempt later in the century to enclose the Pale by a bank and ditch (which was never completed), there never was a literal fence around it.
The expression beyond the pale, meaning outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour, came much later. The idea behind it was that civilisation stopped at the boundary of the pale and beyond lay those who were not under civilised control and whose behaviour therefore was not that of gentlemen. A classic example appears in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, dated 1837: “I look upon you, sir, as a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and abominable public conduct”. The earliest example I’ve found is from Sir Walter Scott in 1819.
It may be older than this, but it surely doesn’t date back to the period of the Irish Pale, or anywhere near. It is often said that it does come directly from that political enclosure, but the three-century gap renders that very doubtful indeed. The idea behind it is definitely the same, though.
Bump
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