Stoid, a quote often attributed variously to Wilde, Shaw or Churchill is that “Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language.” Similarly, lawyers and non-lawyers are frequently divided by a common language.
Let me give examples. I am a barrister of some experience. In court, I conduct the case as I see fit. Yet next to me is usually a young clerk or very junior lawyer who is called my “instructing officer”. This does not mean that this young greenhorn “instructs” me like a teacher might, telling me what to do or say. When lawyers talk about “instructions”, they largely mean information from their clients or witnesses. The instructing officer goes and gets information as it is needed. S/he is not my training wheels. If anything, they are learning from me.
Similarly, one often finds the word “consideration” used by lawyers, as in the phrase “a contract is not complete unless consideration flows from the offeree”. Now a non-lawyer might think this means the offeree has to show respect, goodwill and attentiveness to the feelings of the other party. Not so - consideration effectively means what the offeree is giving in return for what the offeror is offering (I am compressing here - bear with me). Might be money, goods, or even a counter-promise. But it has nothing to do with “showing consideration” to someone as that expression is used in everyday life.
The word “advice” is in the same category of words which seem familiar but have technical meanings that might be foreign to non-lawyers. That is why you are “actively and currently misunderstanding the nature of your own questions.”
Then you’ll be interested to know that you were wrong. This is what you said at 7:26 p.m. yesterday:
According to YOU by YOUR OWN WORDS, “what he was trying to prove” was “that he did in fact say it.”
Thus the issue – according to you yourself – is not whether his statement was true, but whether he made the statement at all.
That’s not hearsay, and it’s not even a hard call as to whether or not it’s hearsay: It’s not. The out-of-court statement is not offered to to prove the truth of the matter asserted in it; the out-of-court statement is offered as in-court evidence (testimony) that the statement was made.
And in case you think this stuff is easy and can be adequately handled by any layperson with a good brain and a love of caselaw, allow me to point out that by recasting the issue in the language you did above, you turned a half-decent argument about whether or not it was hearsay, into a concession that it is not.
Everybody knows the Erie Doctrine, though: Any NFL team based in a city on the shores of Lake Erie will never win a Super Bowl. Am I right, or what? Pah!
I think you misunderstood me. I wasn’t saying anything about who might or might not be at fault. What I was trying to say was that you are an incredibly driven person. From your descriptions, your ex sounds like he was uncooperative, but mostly in a passive agressive way. On the other hand, you have invested a tremendous amount of energy in this process, while he’s off banging the new girl.
Now we enter the twilight zone, where Stoid and mirror Stoid are facing off against each other. Imagine that instead of having to work against the system and your stonewalling ex, you had to work against yourself. (In this scenario, your alternate member has a goatee, so you know she is eeeeeevil!) Imagine how much harder this all would be if the person on the other end of the suit was willing to fight as hard and relentlessly as you. For the purposes of this hypothetical, both you and mirror-Stoid believe that the other is the one causing all the problems.
And then all of a sudden penguins are getting sunburns. Oh, the penguinanity!
Stoid, you pathetic, befuddled nutter, you are being correctly and repeatedly told that you are “actively and currently misunderstanding the nature” of what the answers to your questions would constitute. No matter what, in your mind, you are seeking, the answers would be advice.
You are as deluded, maddening and entertaining as anyone I have seen on SDMB since Scott Plaid left our midst.
The thing is, it’s super, super hard to follow all of this. Unbelieveably hard. Trying to ferret out and keep track of what’s actually relevant to your case vs. stuff you’re throwing out as examples or analogies…I’ve completely lost track, and I’m guessing most people have. I doubt anyone is getting anything wrong here on purpose.
