Joe Patrice is an Editor at Above the Law. For over a decade, he practiced as a...
Kathryn Rubino is a member of the editorial staff at Above the Law. She has a degree...
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021....
Published: | March 15, 2023 |
Podcast: | Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer |
Category: | Legal Entertainment , News & Current Events |
Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan is the latest speaker to cry foul that an audience of law students heckled him to death. He’s received an apology from Stanford Law School already, but the videos released from the event and the witness accounts appear to show the judge playing the role of wrestling heel. Taking the honest if probing questions from the audience and obstinately refusing to answer to further frustrate the students. Elon Musk fired up his Twitter machine to lurch the company into a potentially massive liability before someone — presumably a lawyer — told him about wrongful termination. Maybe he shouldn’t be too quick to ditch the requirement that he run every Tweet by a lawyer first. Finally, Merrick Garland is taking heat for the fact that it’s 2023 and Donald Trump has yet to be charged for anything stemming from the Capitol riot. But Garland’s right.
Special thanks to our sponsor McDermott Will & Emery.
[Music]
Joe Patrice: Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like A Lawyer.
Kathryn Rubino: How are you Jose Patrice?
Joe Patrice: Good. Yes. I am good, but I was not prepared for you to find —
Kathryn Rubino: I enjoy that I seem to have thrown you off your game.
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Kathryn Rubino: That’s a good time for me.
Joe Patrice: Nothing makes this seem more like a professional podcast than constantly trying to throw everybody off balance.
Kathryn Rubino: It makes you unhappy.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, it is true.
Kathryn Rubino: A win is a win.
Chris Williams: People described law as a fast workplace environment. This actually feels on brand.
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Chris Williams: Cussing gets cut off whenever you start speaking.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, I’m Jose Patrice from the Above The Law. Yeah, and that was Chris Williams from Above The Law and we’ve been interrupted before that by Kathryn Rubino. We are here to talk about some of the big stories of the week in the legal universe, though first, as always, we begin with a little bit of a section of the show we like to call “Small Talk.”
Kathryn Rubino: Small Talk.
Joe Patrice: Okay. So that sounded super evil. And with that, so yeah, so today, we’re all kind of dealing with the fallout of some bank collapses. One that’s getting more attention. We don’t need to worry as much about but one that’s getting a little less attention is Signature. So how’s that going? This is small talk, even though it’s kind of it’s legal related.
Kathryn Rubino: It’s not at all small. It’s just not a full segment. But it is absolutely related to our jobs, which is not small talk.
Chris Williams: Medium Talk.
Joe Patrice: Medium Talk.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, we’ve been partying like it’s a 1930s up in here with banks collapsing.
Joe Patrice: Okay.
Kathryn Rubino: Some good times. Obviously, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on Friday. And on Sunday, regulators in New York took over Signature Bank, which is not a ginormous bank. You may not have heard of it but it’s New York based-bank and does a lot of business with law firms, a lot of other professional services, some real estate, and a fairly traditional kind of mix of business one might think. But you’d be correct up until about 2018 which is when Signature in addition to sort of doing all this law firm work started to get heavily involved in crypto.
Joe Patrice: Oh. Yeah, I did see that one of the things that I’ve been tracking on this is that obviously that these three bank closures as of recording in a week that we’re talking about a lot of them have collapsed because the Dodd-Frank protections that were originally created were then loosened in 2018, largely at the lobbying work of Barney Frank himself, who at that point had become a board member of Signature Bank. Interesting.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, he’s certainly made some comments thinking that the regulator’s takeover of Signature was a bit premature. There was a run-on deposits on Friday. But the bank seems to or says at this point that they would have had it under control had they been allowed to open for business on Monday.
Joe Patrice: I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried says the same thing so.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah. But the other kind of interesting part particularly for those who are involved in the crypto industry with Silvergate also sort of going under. Silvergate and Signature were the two primary 24/7 solutions for crypto businesses and exchange. So yeah, it’ll be an interesting time.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, you know that everybody keeps blaming crypto just because it’s completely made up money that’s driven largely by Ponzi schemes and I don’t know if that’s fair.
Kathryn Rubino: Fake money has a way of being fake.
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Kathryn Rubino: Like that’s the subheading to this.
Chris Williams: That’s the corny reason for blaming crypto. I blame crypto because it’s fun to say. Like, you know, the dollar boring. Crypto is mysterious and make tech pros angry.
Kathryn Rubino: Mysterious is really what you want in a financial instrument though.
Chris Williams: Nothing says that cure your trade like I don’t know how much this is worth.
Joe Patrice: So, speaking of how much things are worth, also, quick shout out to the lawyers somewhere in the world who are getting paid for closing arguably the most significant dollar and 20 cent deal in history. The UK SVB Holdings could have become a big problem, but HSBC has stepped in and bought all of SVP UK for one pound.
(00:05:08)
So some lawyers were up all night thinking a deal to allow them to take over —
Kathryn Rubino: Billing a lot more than dollar.
Joe Patrice: One would assume billing more than $1.20 at current exchange rates, so congrats to them. So yeah, so is that good for our small talk segment? I think it probably is. Well no, it’s not Small Talk.
Kathryn Rubino: It’s medium.
Joe Patrice: It’s Medium Talk.
Kathryn Rubino: It’s definitely Medium Talk.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, Medium Talk.
Chris Williams: Pa-pa-ram-pa. Different sound for it.
Joe Patrice: Well that’s why I played the party horn. I thought that that was our Medium Talk sound.
Kathryn Rubino: I like it.
Chris Williams: I respect that. I respect that.
Joe Patrice: Yeah. All right. So let’s get to the important news of the day. What’s going on? Thanks for keeping up with —
Kathryn Rubino: I’m pretty sure it was your story, Joe.
Joe Patrice: That’s true and I thought would invite me —
Kathryn Rubino: So I thought you might want to introduce it.
Joe Patrice: And I thought you might invite me to do it.
Kathryn Rubino: See, it’s not that I didn’t read the pre-show memo, it’s that you’ve fallen down on the job.
Joe Patrice: You’re such a — you’re the opposite of a generous improv partner.
Chris Williams: This is the revenge of Small Talk here. You saw that little segment for like the personal interaction. I like it, I like it.
Joe Patrice: Just yeah.
Kathryn Rubino: You know who I don’t like?
Joe Patrice: Who?
Kathryn Rubino: Judge Duncan.
Joe Patrice: Oh, there we go. All right. Thanks for a segue. So yeah, so we have the —
Kathryn Rubino: I know you need help.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, okay, sure. So this is the most recent episode in the ongoing cancel culture crisis as it is being disingenuously billed throughout the law school world. This time, it is not at Yale finally. Finally we don’t talk about Yale. This is at Stanford. Judge Duncan who’s probably most — he’s involved in a lot of retrograde opinions, but most famously for going out of his way to explain why misgendering people is his role, and that he as a matter of law feels that they must be misgendered. This violated his own circuit’s rules by the way, but he did it anyway.
Chris Williams: That’s a hot take.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, made him something of a little bit of a minor celebrity among right wing.
Kathryn Rubino: Well, he’s trying to increase that, isn’t he?
Joe Patrice: Among kind of the right wing powers that be that choose who gets promoted down the road? He does seem to have seemingly decided he’d fallen behind in that and needed, needed a cue boost and decided to go —
Kathryn Rubino: He wanted some headlines and he’s got them.
Joe Patrice: Yes. So he went to Stanford for an event. There was a protest, as one might expect from somebody like that going to Stanford, then, yeah, so he’s managed to get Stanford, the school to apologize to him in a letter.
Kathryn Rubino: So what did he do that Stanford had felt that they had to apologize?
Joe Patrice: Well, I mean there were protesters, right? And the usual procedure of claiming that he was shouted down by these law students acting outrageous behavior where they are not acting like real law students who would understand and civilly debate things, you know, the usual talking points. Unfortunately, the extra layer to this is that say what you will about the Alliance Defending Freedom who’s been kind of driving a lot of these events, the recognized hate group who keeps going to law school campuses, having a protest and then claiming, “Oh, look at all these horrible law students.” Judge Duncan took it a new direction and a new direction that that kind of — I mean, I would have thought would not have helped him out. But it potentially opens a new chapter in this ongoing discussion, because he rolled in and rather than really strive to maintain that moral high ground of “Yeah, you don’t like me, but I will engage you and I’ll listen to your questions and answer and we’ll have civil discourse.” The problem for him is that these students decided to do that. There were obviously protests and signs and so on, and less than civil comments at various points throughout the event, but what ended up happening is several people started asking him actual pointed questions about how he would defend certain decisions that he made.
Kathryn Rubino: How would he take that?
Joe Patrice: He did not do well. He did not like the idea that he might have to actually answer a question, which historically has been kind of the moral high ground that you needed to make this whole thing work. It’s kind of the conceit of the whole thing is though, like the debate may can see that these people use unfortunately.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, I mean, fundamentally, these sorts of speakers want to paint themselves as the only adult in the room, and that falls apart when you’re acting like a toddler.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, the victimhood game is problematic when you start yelling in students faces that they’re appalling idiots.
(00:10:04)
He dismissed a woman telling a story of how she had been raped with a nice story. He claims in an update to that that he didn’t say that. That what he’d really said is that’s a story not a question.
Chris Williams: Which is better somehow.
Joe Patrice: Query whether or not that’s better in any way but that is his defense of what he actually had said there.
Chris Williams: He said T question.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, basically, it’s more of a comment than a question. It was kind of his take. But still, yeah, he’s active, he was asked about in particular about that misgendering opinion and asked how he squares that opinion with other canons of legal practice that you’re supposed to treat people with respect. Why is it that like this situation does not deserve the respect of that? His response to that was — just read the opinion. But the reasons in the opinion. All right. That’s not really engaging in civil discourse. He was also asked about some voting rights cases I believe it was. He said, “Well, which case? Cite the case. Cite the case.” And when the student didn’t have it off the top of his head, he apparently berated them that, “You think you could get away with this in court not knowing.” Then the student, because —
Kathryn Rubino: This is not court first of all.
Joe Patrice: It’s not court and because the internet is amazing. The student then found the cite and said this one, and he said, “Was I even on the panel of that one?” And my question is, does he think that would work in court to not even know whether what his job is? Yeah. And then he blew off that question too. The whole thing kind of became an episode where be careful what you wish for. The conceit of all this is wished to have open debate where people ask you questions and then when they did, he was not ready.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, I think this wildly backfired on Judge Duncan. I mean, even I think folks who are predisposed to say things like, “Oh, these protests have gotten out of hand, this is a problem.” But even those folks are saying as bad as you might think students protesting someone on campus is, this behavior is worse.
Joe Patrice: Well, but that’s kind of the — I hear that and definitely some voices that are generally critical of students that are saying that, however, the part that I think is a little more scary is that it has seemingly worked. The usual folks, the Free Beacon and Ed Whelan and all the like usual — and Jonathan Turley, your usual kind of clown car folks who trump up these issues reference totally intended I guess there, they are not wavering. They’re like one would think if this was really a backfire, they would try to downplay this one as much as possible, but they’re leaning into it too. They’re very much re characterizing this as he did nothing wrong. And it’s all the students and there’s some disingenuously edited together video clips that make it seem like they were all out to get him. There are more full clips that some folks I know Jay Willis of Balls & Strikes have put up that show that this really —
Kathryn Rubino: This is not the way it went down. This is the edited version.
Joe Patrice: Right. So we’ve got some —
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, I mean, I think we kind of made this point when we were talking about James Hoh, another federal judge very much to the right. When we’re talking about him, I think that there’s a rush to get the most headlines to appear the most. Obviously, despite any legal methods, just going to give the political results that the far right want and that’s how they get promoted.
Joe Patrice: It is resume via trolling. But here’s the thing about Judge Ho’s situation though where Judge Ho parachuted himself into the Yale situation that didn’t involve him and started making claims that he was going to boycott them. That’s how he kind of got his attention there. But the thing with Ho is he’s a lot more clever. I mean he held on to that moral high ground. He leaned into the idea that I know —
Kathryn Rubino: I’m serious and you’re not.
Joe Patrice: I’m serious and yeah, they could have just let — I mean, part of that is the benefit brilliantly on his part of he wasn’t part of this protest, right? He was on the outside talking about it after the fact. He didn’t have to have the moment where somebody asked him a pointed question and he didn’t have an answer. This is where Duncan seems to have miscalculated, but or maybe not. I mean, if they’re letting it happen.
Kathryn Rubino: But even though his name might be on the top of some lists, I do think that this kind of an incident and the backlash that is coming from some corners affects your ability to be reconfirmed by the Senate to a higher job.
Joe Patrice: I mean, perhaps. I don’t know.
(00:15:00)
We are kind of in a moment of seeing zero gravity to see where this goes. If the narrative ends up leaning more towards the way in which Zillow Ed, as we all call him, because he’s the one who tried to —
Kathryn Rubino: That’s a decently old reference. I appreciate it, though.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, that’s the one where Ed Whelan tried to prove that Cavanaugh could not have possibly engage in an attempted assault because he’s looked at the floor plans on Zillow and it just doesn’t add up. But yeah, if that narrative holds, then maybe you can get away with this. And I kind of characterize it very much as like a wrestling heels situation. Like he rolled in like Ric Flair. “You all hate me, because I’m so pretty.” And then got the crowd that way.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah. I mean, I hear what you’re saying. But fundamentally, you’re going to need moderate Republicans at a minimum in order to pull off the next level.
Joe Patrice: Maybe. Yeah, I don’t know.
Kathryn Rubino: It’ll be interesting to see. This just happened fairly recently to see what the longer term blowback is.
Joe Patrice: I mean, I do think that he is more of a long shot than somebody like Ho anyway.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, I think that’s true.
Joe Patrice: So, ultimately, maybe you’re right. I don’t think this gets him ahead of Ho in Leonard Leo’s book of wish lists.
[Music]
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Joe Patrice: All right. We’re back for anybody who’s interested. Elon Musk continues to screw everything up on illegal if not business level. But he’s had another run in with —
Chris Williams: Wait, we should clarify. You’re talking about the killing monkeys with the neuro link stuff?
Joe Patrice: Oh, no. We already knew he was killing monkeys with neuro link.
Chris Williams: Oh, are we talking about Tesla losing like hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stock?
Joe Patrice: You know, no, actually, I think we already knew about that one.
Chris Williams: Oh, okay.
Joe Patrice: He did something else that got him into hot water last week. I don’t quite remember what it was.
Chris Williams: Oh, I think he did an ableism.
Joe Patrice: Well, yeah.
Kathryn Rubino: He did an ableism. There you go. There you go.
Joe Patrice: Fair enough. Or for those of you who are more legally inclined, anti-discrimination law tends to say that you don’t publicly mock employees for having —
Kathryn Rubino: PDA violations about.
Joe Patrice: Having muscular dystrophy. But you know, Elon is an iconoclast who —
Kathryn Rubino: Elon is Elon.
Chris Williams: Elon Musks.
Joe Patrice: He’s playing 12 dimensional chess here, friends. This is all part of the plan. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about how this went down.
Chris Williams: Yeah. Well, man child billionaire Elon Musk, after being contacted by indeterminate, unknown at the time employee contacted Musk directly because after nine days from reaching out to HR, HR never got back to him. He says, “Hey, do I work for you?” And then Elon decides that this is a good time to show his fans how cultured he is. So I think he has like some clips from like, some office comedy, you know, the type of stuff you’d expect?
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Chris Williams: People who have bad Elden Ring builds to find humorous. What I’m saying is, he may have never progressed past 1993. Anyway, so adding towards that South Park as humor, he then mocks the guy for having muscular dystrophy. He’s like, “This guy does no work.” Over time he did find out not only does this guy do a lot of work for Twitter, he’s also like one of the best people in the world. Like three topics. He does a lot of work at Twitter, he does a lot of work everywhere else and he has muscular dystrophy. So he’s harder working than everyone else which you can’t make fun out for people like Twitter, by the way.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, so there’s definitely that. There’s also kind of importantly he had an employment agreement that includes $100 million termination clause.
Chris Williams: Well, heres’ the thing.
(00:19:59)
So the guy named Holly since he has like tact and common sense. He never specifically said “Run me what you owe me motherfucker.” But he — he did it in like the ways you would expect an adult to do. Like, “Am I allowed to talk about this? Is this permission to disclose? Here’s what I do, blah, blah, blah. The thing we had talked about is that still in play? And the bumbling car monkey guys like, “Ohh, what are you talking about? Eh, I’m smart.” He committed like the workplace lawsuit equivalent of dumping over a huge truck of ramen noodles and everybody just like rubbernecking at the crash, because it’s so beautiful to see in rural times, like, Oh, he’s actively losing money.
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Kathryn Rubino: Also because he’s a man child who needs all the attention all the time. We saw all because he’s forced his tweets onto everyone’s feed. So even when he fucks up, everybody knows it.
Chris Williams: And then once he’s like, “Oh, no, what is that on the fan blades? Is that shit? Did the shit hit the fan.” And then he goes back and deletes tweets, where there was one tweet and he was like, “This guy is literally the worst person in the world.” All the people who he knows hates him, because he had a popularity poll was like, should I still run Twitter? And everyone said, no, they take screenshots. So can’t clean the mess he tweets once he tried to make it.
Joe Patrice: It does raise a question though. Like what’s going on with his legal counsel here?
Kathryn Rubino: He’s fired them all, no?
Joe Patrice: I mean, there’s been there’s been a lot of folks fired.
Kathryn Rubino: This is what happens when you fire all the lawyers?
Joe Patrice: I mean, yeah.
Chris Williams: If the conditions counselor look anything like what any other people that work from look like if they say anything to him either publicly or privately about the bullshit he’s shitting about, they get fired.
Joe Patrice: But you don’t need to question his like feelings to say, “You can feel however you want, sir, you will owe $100 million if this happens, how do we feel about that?” That’s the sort of advice that I think you could give pretty easily.
Chris Williams: The fun part was that the suspected contract breach, he would pay the guy $100 million because the company that he’d had was bought up by Twitter, right?
Joe Patrice: Right.
Chris Williams: Then on top of that, out of speculation, oh shit. Maybe instead of playing 4D checkers, Elon is playing chess with checkers pieces. Stock then plummeted. And it is like, oh wait, this isn’t even the first time. There were four other people on do not fire lists that got fired. And I’m like.
Kathryn Rubino: I thought it was the to be fired list. It was a simple reading comprehension issue there.
Joe Patrice: It’s bad. But it really does. I mean, in a serious angle on this. I do think there’s something to be said for how do you manage a client whether you’re in-house or not. And if you have a client who is prone to firing people for questioning him, you know, maybe you pick your battles. You don’t necessarily give him the primer on how discrimination law works but you point out the contract.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, of course you can fire him. It’s going to cost a hundred million dollars.
Joe Patrice: You do something, because you kind of have an obligation to try. But I mean, the problem is this is how all of this has already happened, right? Like fundamentally the reason this guy even owns Twitter is because he told Skadden to stop asking for a due diligence protection in the agreement, and they ultimately acquiesced to that. And then when he decided he wanted out, he had already waived the only way he could get out. Like it’s the customer is always right, but also a moron. And At a certain point, where do you as a lawyer draw the line between doing what the client asks and protecting the client from themselves?
Kathryn Rubino: Very glad I’m not Elon Musk’s lawyer though.
Chris Williams: I’m going to say thankfully that’s not for me to figure out how. I just get to call the guy stupid. I think it is the proper position to be in.
Joe Patrice: I think that’s right.
Kathryn Rubino: That’s fair. That’s fair.
Chris Williams: But that’s just me thinking like a lawyer.
Joe Patrice: Ooh, wow. Naming the show. Well done.
Chris Williams: You get it, you get it. Yeah.
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
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Joe Patrice: All right. The other thing that happened this week is our former host, Elie Mystal back when I didn’t get interrupted all the time.
Kathryn Rubino: This is so much better.
Chris Williams: I agree.
Joe Patrice: Also, anybody who listens to an archival episode will know that that’s not true at all.
Chris Williams: They would also agree.
Joe Patrice: I got interrupted constantly then. But Elie Mystal wrote a piece in the nation where he talked about, he really blasted Merrick Garland for having not put Trump in under indictment earlier. It is not particularly clear for what and by that, I mean, obviously, he meant for various January 6 actions, but it wasn’t very particularly clear what statute he thought would have supported an indictment based on the evidence that at that point was undeveloped. I responded with an article about how you can’t really blame Merrick Garland for that, because that’s just not how the criminal justice system operates. If the various statutes that one could charge Trump under if you were to do that, you would have to either cross lines into what incitement means that would be particularly troubling. Or you would have to have rolled in with half proven claims and hoped that the evidence would miraculously appear before the trial, or else you’d end up with, you know, giving Trump a double jeopardy protection from ever going after it.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, I mean, I think two things. First of all, as tempting as I think incitement is, and I think that what Trump did was obviously a lot closer. But I think that anything that extends what incitement is, is just more likely to be used against BLM protesters, other protesters, anytime there’s even two pennies worth of property damage.
Joe Patrice: We already saw this. This already went to the Supreme Court. They tried to go after DeRay for speaking at an event and then later one person at the event threw a brick. And they tried to put him in prison for that. And even this Supreme Court thought that was insane.
Kathryn Rubino: Right. But I was saying if we extend it to this case without more evidence, particularly at the time that what we knew then, I think that would have been particularly problematic. I think the other point is that it underplays how valuable an acquittal would have been for Trump. If you didn’t have all your ducks in a row. If you don’t have a slam dunk for shore conviction, I think that Donald Trump getting to get up and scream about how he’s been acquitted and how that proves that he’s innocent, is infinitely more dangerous than not going after him.
Joe Patrice: I mean, that’s the Omar line, right? Like if you come at the king, you can’t you can’t be missing here. Like that’s the whole point.
Chris Williams: It was probably cooler when Omar said it but I get you.
Joe Patrice: Right. I was trying to inject a little bit of pop culture cool into the show.
Chris Williams: I respect that.
Kathryn Rubino: Cool?
Joe Patrice: Yeah. All right. Anyway, yeah. But this was the back and forth we got. And Elie has a lot of fervent fans who have been sending me a lot of very mean mail about me questioning whether or not you could have just kind of magic Trump into prison.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah. And I think that magicing thing is the right way also to frame it because it’d be great. I understand the impulse to say, you know, kind of in a, “I know it when I see it,” I don’t know the statute, but I know that shit ain’t good. I feel that, I viscerally feel that, but I don’t think that that is what lawyers one, but certainly most specifically, the Attorney General should be doing.
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Chris Williams: Yeah. There’s a tension between the colloquial use of incitement, because like, there’s no question there. But like thinking about things legally, it really is like, Well, what exactly happened here? Because I agree with Joe. I’m like, however incitement gets stretched here, in this case, how will this affect people protesting pipelines? How this affect people trying to draw attention to rapidly approaching climate crisis? And it will be great for like contextual irony like I think about that there were a bunch of laws that were passed or meant to like net Black Lives Matter protesters that ended up getting used against Trump supporters like that. That was back and forth. But like, yeah, it’s like writing with a scalpel, you have to be very particular with how you cut and dissect what these words you mean in a legal context.
(00:30:04)
Joe Patrice: And it seemed — it kind of felt like a lot of the — “Oh, we should we should put him in jail for X, Y, Z.” I would try to link that up with a statute that already exists and I was like — but if these are the elements, you don’t you don’t have that. Anyway.
Kathryn Rubino: It would be nice though.
Joe Patrice: And well, there’s a reason why mob bosses don’t go to jail immediately, right? Like at a certain point.
Chris Williams: At least have for two years.
Kathryn Rubino: They don’t go to jail for tax evasion.
Joe Patrice: Well, I mean, there’s certainly that too but —
Chris Williams: It not because some tax issue with Trump or anything.
Joe Patrice: Yeah. But that’s the issue. Like of those kind of financial crimes in this classified documents case, like a much more concrete issues but they aren’t ones that Elie was really talking about because he’s more talking about — his whole goal is that there should have been something that could have triggered the 14th amendments bar on somebody holding public office down the road. Like with a mob boss, they don’t go to jail instantly either because the whole design of the system is they don’t do any actual crime, right?
Kathryn Rubino: They don’t do the thing.
Joe Patrice: Like, somebody else does and then over time you get up the chain and find out they were ordered to do that thing. But you can’t just jump right to it. And yes, we all know that that’s not enough. Anyway. So that’s been that this week. Any other last items before we begin our farewell? I have one.
Chris Williams: I just want to say, this relates to a billboard I’ve seen and by that I mean, I probably saw it online. It’s important to keep in mind in this context. This lawyer advertising his service and he said, “Just because you did it, it does not mean you’re guilty.”
Joe Patrice: Nice. Fair enough. So, our one announcement is we aren’t going to be able to have a show next week just the hecticness of legal week and everything is going to force that off. So we will see you in two weeks everybody. Probably talk about legal week and everything when that happens.
Kathryn Rubino: Stay tuned for the very exciting legal technology updates.
Chris Williams: That was good.
Joe Patrice: They are exciting.
Chris Williams: Fuck the updates. That was some good voice. That was some good voice. I was like, what outros of anime was this? That was good. Have you considered doing radio?
Joe Patrice: Subscribe to the show so you can get new episodes when they come out and give us reviews, stars, write something, it always helps more people find the show. You should listen to other shows like Kathryn has The Jabot. I’m on The Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. You should be listening to the other offerings of the Legal Talk Network. You should follow us on social media. Elon’s pet home is where a lot of us are. The blog is @atlblog. I’m @josephpatrice, she’s at @Kathryn1 as in the numeral 1 there. Chris is @writesforrent.
Chris Williams: With the W.
Joe Patrice: Yes. Oh yeah, good point. Yeah, that has been a common issue. So write. As in he’s writing. Yeah, okay, anyway.
Chris Williams: It’s meant to be clever.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, it is. You should be reading Above The Law so you see these stories and others before we chat about them here. And with all that we will check in with you in a bit.
Kathryn Rubino: Peace.
Chris Williams: Peace.
[Music]
Outro: The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer.
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Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer |
Above the Law's Joe Patrice and Kathryn Rubino examine everyday topics through the prism of a legal framework.