Oh, and btw, I’m currently working on a bankruptcy for a poor person, for free. How does that fit in with your “Justice only for the rich” bullshit? Cause the way I see it, the system is letting a poor person get out of all the debts they legally accrued, and I am giving them my time for free. That’s a double-dose of help for the poor, brought to you by the justice system.
It’s assonance, actually, given that it’s the vowels that are being replicated. 
But enjoy the gift shop on the way out. 
nyctea: Do a bit of research on this one. I suggest you go back to the original 2006 thread and read forward. Stoid has been given a lot of good advice by the attorneys on this site over the years and most of it was rejected.
Stoid’s story is a case history of a breakup gone bad subtitled: “Once happy couple sue themselves into oblivion.”
I’m not sure what the point of this thread is except to further dump on someone who has already been handed their ass. Bad form.
Admit it- you’re not doing it totally for free. You’re getting backrubs, aren’t you? AREN’T YOU?
YOU WISH YOU’D GONE TO MASSAGE THERAPY SCHOOL NOW!
FWIW, I disagree with the OP. There’s nothing wrong with asking for information and advice on legal issues so long as you recognize the dangers involved in doing so over the internet. There are people out there who can help guide a pro se litigant toward helpful research paths without violating any professional conduct guidelines or state laws (paralegals, law students, people who have been party to similar lawsuits, etc.). I think it was the feeling of entitlement to advice, especially in the context of a licensed attorney’s response, that got people’s hackles up in the other thread.
It is hyperbole to say that “justice is only available to people who can afford it.” Criminal defendants are guaranteed lawyers, and often very good ones if they are lucky enough to live in a state that pays PDs decently and doesn’t massively overload them. The ACLU and many others work for free on civil rights issues. There are definitely areas of law for which there is little help though. Defending civil suits is one of the big ones. But I’m not exactly sure what that has to do with the OP. It does not follow from there being problems with lower middle class people defending lawsuits that attorneys should therefore dispense advice over the internet.
No one is stopping Stoid or anyone else from researching at a law library. If there is some value added by speaking to an actual attorney, then we can safely “assume that unless you spend the money on a law degree and pass a test, that you cannot possibly learn the law” enough to answer the questions confidently yourself.
What an astoundingly stupid comparison!! In a board filled with posts that manage to miss the mark, this one not only flies wide of it, it manages to imperile all spectators! The imbecility of the attempt to liken massage therapy to attorney advice would be enough to have me frothing at the mouth if I wasn’t already laughing my head off at the concept someone would seriously post it!
(Sorry, there’s some hyperbole going on there. I’m new to this Pit thing, and just trying to get into the feel of being a bit over-the-top with the posting style. It is, though, a pretty dumb comparison).
A massage therapist is someone who actually, like you know, massages people. I don’t see you getting a whole lot of clientele where you say something like, “Mr. Smith, I’ve been looking over your body, and it turns out that, if you use a #2 auto-massager with the dual head attachment for 15 min. on each side of your quads, you’ll relieve that nasty tendency to cramp up during exercise. That’ll be $150. Next, please!” Most of what people come to you for is the massage itself. Now I ask you, what if all your good friends, and people you didn’t even know, but who posted on a message board with you, kept asking you for free massages? Would you do it?
Now, add to that suppose that if you massage them, and they don’t like the result, they can sue you for malpractice? And because large numbers of them end up unhappy with the result, you end under the threat of suit regularly. So you have to buy really expensive insurance to cover the possibility. Insurance that probably doesn’t cover a suit from one of those friends or anonymous message board posters.
I think that, without much added reflection, you will see just how inapt, and inept, your comparison was. :smack:
Actually, law students are bound by rules of professional conduct, and there is that pesky concept in criminal law called “unauthorized practice of law” that should dampen, if not completely dissuade, an otherwise non-regulated individual from tendering legal advice.
(The following is an illustration regarding legal costs, it is not an invitation to reopen public argument about my case.) Wanna know something scary as hell? The final tally of lawyers fees in our case will be about $400,000. $85,000 for the two that helped me (and didn’t charge the max possible) and about $300,000 for my ex’s.
Wanna know what the receiver has cost so far? About $80,000.
Total cost for the people who “helped” us, $480,000. Minimum.
Wanna know what we could have liquidated for when he split in Jan 2006, TOTAL? Maybe $200,000 on a really good day. Which we weren’t having, so it probably would have been more like $150,000. $75,000 each.
Rock. Hard place. Stoid…step into the breach.
Again, not inviting more shit dumped on my head about my case, had plenty, thanks, but would like to share something of which I’m very proud.
I believe, I hope, I intend that I did a little bit of good for other people on one particular issue. ONe of the biggest fights I had during the last year was the fight to not be put out of the house by the receiver, who filed an unlawful detainer against me. Without going into it in depth, I assure you: this was completely outside the law. Simply: I am an owner on title and I had done nothing wrong. The receiver, as a matter of course, always automatically evicts owners in partition cases. He has no genuine legal authority to do so, but he does it.
I fought like hell. It was huge and blossomed into quite the educational experience. Finally, after many months, the judge told him to back off. She wouldn’t actually come right out and say what was true, which was that receivers in partition cases cannot bring UDs against owners on title, PERIOD, but she did tell him to back off of ME specifically.
However, months after that, in her final judgment, she spent an entire page outlining elaborate circumstances under which he could go after me for contempt if I was uncooperative. And after a full page of that, she inserted one wonderful sentence: teh court finds that in cases like this, owner on title, an unlawful detainer is not the proper remedy.
THANK YOU!
I circled and sent it to the receiver with a note, since he’s very active in teh receiver “community”, that he would surely like to pass that along to his fellow receivers so they will all stop unlawfully putting owners on title into the street using the UD laws. (there’s important reasons for this, which again, I won’t go into, except to say that the UD laws are harsh and rigid about the applicaiton. There is no room for discretion at all.)
And I’m proud because once I learned that the receiver had been doing this for years and getting away with it, I was mortified and I very much wanted to stop him not only for me, but for all the other people who would be at his effect. Since he supposedly wants to do things lawfully…perhaps my fight will have that result.
And if I ever do end up in law school, the purpose will be to help people like me: people who fall in the nethworld of legal problems were they aren’t indigents fighting standard issues, and they aren’t rich enough to hire someone to do it all for them. I would want to specialize in limited scope representation.
No they aren’t (at least not in every state), and the criminal laws often do not include advice offered without compensation.
get the fuck over yourselves. Hi gfactor.
Um, now wait a minute. This is The Pit. Reasoned responses go somewhere else, don’t they??
Seriously, the real issue is expectation, as you touch upon. I don’t have any issue with posting a thread that says, “I’ve got some issues with equity versus statute law; can someone point me in the direction of a good resource or two to bone up on these issues?” And if they offer a few details to help make sure that the pointers are not irrelevant, that’s fine.
But coming into a Message Board (or any other place, like the cocktail party, or the bridge club, or the golf foursome on Sunday) and asking your buddy/partner/fellow member a question along the lines of, “I could use some good information here. [Insert long recitation of numerous details of case, most of which is totally irrelevant to actual legal issues at hand] Now what do you think, is this a case of reflexive transitivity? Or should I be looking at hibernated Meineke functions? I just need some information, you know, not any actual advice” is just plain ridiculous. What you are really asking for is professional help, professional help you have no desire to pay for. It’s similar to walking into a doctor’s office and saying, “Hey, doc, I’ve got some real upper left quadrant pain. Do you think I have a heart attack going on?? I can’t afford to pay you for this information, I hope you understand…” :rolleyes:
Lots of places offer free or reduced fee services. Most any law school will have a clinic where you can get such things on any topic, not just the basic ones listed in some of the posts ^^^^. We had one at my law school (McGeorge School of Law, Sacramento); it gave law students a chance to bone up on many areas of the law while helping low income clients with their problems. While I won’t go so far as to say that those who are resource poor can obtain the same “justice” that those who are resource rich can, I will say that it’s disingenuous to suggest that most who try the method I’ve suggested above are doing so out of poverty.
I don’t think we need your invitation; thanks for clarifying, though.
This sounds like the kind of behavior that results in bad breakups which cost you half a million to litigate…
I would love to see this. I can imagine the essay in crim law now:
“I spot several issues arising from Alice’s shooting of Bob with a pistol. First, the bullet could be considered abandoned property and Alice will need to file an action in replevin to recover it. This dates back to the early Roman period with the doctrine of Au Jus, in which arbitration regarding the evidentiary properties of the Federal Marshal and their Knights Templar was subjected to trial by the ultimate fact of trover. It, thus, does not lie in equity, except in the 4th district of the 14th Federal circuit, which uses a civil law theory.”
Never go to Yahoo Answers. I went there a couple of times expecting to find actual discussions of books and history and the like. Other than to discuss TV programs or genealogy or the like it’s completely a waste because, no exaggeration, about 99% of the threads in History and Literature and Science, etc., are lazy ass dumbass kids doing homework and asking such strenuous research questions as “What were the consequences of the Battle of Gettysburg?” (which they manage to misspell twice) and other things that- again no exaggeration- could almost all be answered with a trip to wikipedia or, God forbid, cracking their textbook.
The amazing thing though is the number of people who actually help them and give formulated in depth answers. I don’t know if they’re trying to score with 14 year olds or if they honesty think the bottom feeder gives a damn about the answer other than to cut and paste it into their assignment.
More on topic: On SDMB we have the IANAL disclaimer for when people have some knowledge of an issue but no expertise, and when I ask a legal question I have the “I don’t hold anyone responsible and am not going to act on this advice without corroboration” disclaimer, but I wonder-
If I did say “Can I not pay rent to my landlord for XY&Z” and somebody chimed in “Yeah, that’s totally valid”, would that be considered practicing law without a license since
1- they didn’t represent themselves as a lawyer
2- they never physically met the person
Also, would it make a difference if it was, say, Bricker, who is a lawyer, but wasn’t wearing his lawyer hat and by his own admission didn’t know the facts of the case and was just giving general advice.
I’m a reference librarian and I’ve had a good many legal questions over the years, especially when I worked at a large research university. Some people would not take “I can’t help you I’m not a lawyer” for an answer either- they were very persistent. The only thing I could do other than tell them that I can’t give legal advice is show them how to look up information in Code of Law books (and even then I can’t attempt to explain or elaborate on anything in there more than to offer a legal dictionary) and few of them had any interest in doing that.
We don’t permit threadshitting in the Pit. Please desist.
Gfactor
Pit Moderator
The irony meter just jumped…
Of course, the well-written and in-depth answers are never the ones chosen as the best answer; that privilege is invariably reserved for, “Duh, it was the end of WWII n00b”
[quote=“Stoid, post:28, topic:496115”]
(The following is an illustration regarding legal costs, it is not an invitation to reopen public argument about my case.) Wanna know something scary as hell? The final tally of lawyers fees in our case will be about $400,000. $85,000 for the two that helped me (and didn’t charge the max possible) and about $300,000 for my ex’s.
Wanna know what the receiver has cost so far? About $80,000.
Total cost for the people who “helped” us, $480,000. Minimum.
Wanna know what we could have liquidated for when he split in Jan 2006, TOTAL? Maybe $200,000 on a really good day. Which we weren’t having, so it probably would have been more like $150,000. $75,000 each.
Rock. Hard place. Stoid…step into the breach.
[\QUOTE]
If you could trade time for money, would you? You have spent an amazing amount of time and money on a break up, and making him pay. More, from your admission than it was actually worth. You are creating the rock and the hard place. Settle, get on with you life, lady. Please try to get some perspective.
You have to separate the criminal question from the ethical question.
On the criminal side, some states only criminalize the unauthorized practice of law for compensation. Of course, the problem with the internet is that you usually don’t know where the person asking the question actually is, or who might be reading your answer elsewhere. So knowing your own state’s laws isn’t really enough if you want to be cautious.
On the ethics side, for obvious reasons, the rules generally only cover lawyers. Though some states do have specific rules for law students. For people covered by the ethical rules, as laid out in the other thread, almost any advice along the lines you suggest can get one in trouble (even with clear disclaimers). The absence of a physical meeting is irrelevant.
Well, for what my two cents are worth, it sounds like you might want to investigate derivated brachiopiling (though, of course, you’ll need to take care to avoid morchivicating your exponentials).
Derivated brachiopiling only applies in the case of incorporeal hereditament. At common law, it never comes up except in cases of a suit against a supranational government and/or deity, and of course in those cases you’ll be much too busy trying to sort out whether declarations of war and angelic manifestations constitute hearsay to worry about morchivating your exponentials.