Ernie Mullins Has a Question for Steve Zack!

Apparently tired of publishing my pal George L. Metcalfe's "Messages from Leesburg," the Florida Bar News has turned to Kissimmee lawyer Ernest J. Mullins for some fresh insights:

Here’s my question to Mr. Zack: “Hey Steve, when you were coming over here from Cuba, how many southbound rafts did you see?” Oh, and then there’s this: “We cannot fight to establish the rule of law around the world and watch it jeopardized in this country. When 80 percent of poor people, mostly women and minorities, have no access to the court system, we do not have the rule of law.”

Will somebody tell me what that even means? I go to court every day. I’ve been going to court every day for the last 25 years. I don’t know how many millionaires I’ve seen in there, but it’s not too many. When I go to court, I see mostly women, poor people, and minorities in there. Where is this 80 percent coming from? Is he kidding? Nobody, in 25 years, has said to me, “Gee, I tried to get into court on this, but they turned me away because I live below the povery (sic) level, and I’m a minority.”

Hmm, I only practice logic irregularly, but isn't this a classic argument by anecdote (there's also some argument by personal experience).

Here's what one smart guy said about this form of argument:

Argument by anecdote is when you prove a point with a story.  It is a very compelling argument, because people like stories about other people more than they like cold, hard facts.   Too often, though, the argument by anecdote is used when the facts are stacked heavily against a position.  If you don’t have the facts, tell a story.  People will believe the anecdote because it demonstrates what they themselves believe to be true.  That’s why you’ll find more arguments by anecdotes proffered by those on the losing end of the “facts” battle.

I did exactly 23 seconds of Google research, and came across this March 16, 2011 ABA publication, "The Growing Crisis of Underfunding State Courts," which has very few personal anecdotes but lots of pesky things called "facts":

The ABA’s Task Force on the Preservation of the Justice System, co-chaired by David Boies and Theodore B. Olson, has been investigating the under-reported but increasingly serious problems resulting from the underfunding of the nation’s courts. Today, as part of that on-going effort, we are releasing an informal survey of American Bar Association members that helps quantify the problems experienced by citizens and all persons seeking justice in jurisdictions around the country. The systematic underfunding of the country’s courts causes delays in court proceedings, loss of staff and reduction of services. It prevents court cases from being heard and leads to delayed justice.

So the ABA has a whole task force studying this issue -- who knew?

Another four seconds of research and I came across this, from October 2010, reporting on the results of the World Justice Project's new Rule of Law Index:

 [A] world-wide survey unveiled Thursday morning . . . ranks the United States lowest among 11 developed nations when it comes to providing access to justice to its citizens -- and lower than some third-world nations in some categories.

Particularly when it comes to access to and affordability of legal counsel in civil disputes, the U.S. ranks 20 out of the 35 nations surveyed, below not only developed nations but also such countries as Mexico, Croatia and the Dominican Republic.

The results are from the World Justice Project's new "Rule of Law Index", which assesses how laws are implemented and enforced in practice around the globe. Countries are rated on such factors as whether government officials are accountable, whether legal institutions protect fundamental rights, and how ordinary people fare in the system. The index will expand from 35 countries to 70 next year.

The lowest-ranking countries in this year's survey included Liberia, Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan.

The U.S. didn't lead the world on any of the rule-of-law measures, ranking near the bottom of the developed world on most -- including even fundamental rights. But the most striking findings related to access to justice for ordinary people.

So we beat Nigeria and Pakistan!

I'm glad things are ok at the local courthouse in Kissimmee.

But I guess it's everywhere else that people seem to be worried about.

3d DCA vs. 1st DCA -- Let's Compare Courthouses!

There is an unintentionally hilarious article in the Florida Bar News that curiously does not involve or even mention my pal George L. Metcalfe.

It purports to compare the palatial "Taj Mahal" like new 1st DCA facility with, of all things, our own little bunker.

Let's see how we stack up!

** Fasano was critical of a rubber-floored exercise area in the new First DCA, which he referred to as a gymnasium. But other DCAs also have exercise areas. But all are ad hoc, set up in storage areas or mechanical rooms and using donated equipment.

That's right --  I know this because I personally donated my old vibrating belt, which you can see in use at the 3d DCA closet/gym in this undated photo:

I also gave them my old medicine ball and a pair of kettle bells -- hey wait, all these things are making comebacks!

** Fasano also noted that the First DCA “gymnasium” had an attached shower room and wondered how common that was. All of the other DCAs reported having showers although they were part of restrooms. Most reported one or two showers for each gender, with the exception of the Third DCA, which has separate showers in seven of its judicial suites.

Let's see, ten judges but only seven showers -- that math works for me.

** The private bathrooms for judges at the First DCA also have garnered attention. They include a toilet, a mahogany medicine cabinet, and a marble-topped small vanity with sink, in a space about the size, or perhaps a little larger, of a bathroom in a typical home. Every other DCA, with the exception of the Second DCA’s Tampa branch courthouse, also include bathrooms for judges, although smaller. Suhr noted the Second DCA’s bathrooms are four by six feet — less than half the size of the First DCA’s. Third DCA Marshal Al Sadowski said the small judicial bathrooms there each have a toilet and a sink bolted to the wall.

Bolted to the wall?  You mean like in prison?

** Fasano also criticized the kitchens in each judicial suite, which feature a sink and a long, marble-topped counter over painted cabinets. The Second and Third DCAs do not have kitchens in the judicial suites.

Excuse me, but is someone forgetting a certain coffee maker?

Anyways, I'd take a private shower over a kitchen any day.

** In appearance, there is little in common between the new First DCA courthouse and other DCA courthouses. Those are one or two story structures where any columns appear to be almost symbolic, while the First DCA features large columns inside and outside of its three-story home. None of the others include domes, which is an architectural highlight of the First DCA structure.

This is unfair -- I believe the bunker's architecture speaks for itself.

(Oops -- have I gone too far?)

I Fought the Law.

I'm too depressed to discuss the election right now, but I do want to highlight what for me was a personal tragedy last night:  fervent Florida Bar News letter writer George L. Metcalfe inexplicably failed to persuade Central Florida voters that he deserved to be their next Congressman, drawing only 1.9 percent of the vote!

What the hail is wrong with Florida voters?

But enough with bad news, let's discuss something uplifting and empowering -- the Supreme Court debating government censorship:

The law would impose $1,000 fines on stores that sell violent video games to people under 18. It defined violent games as those “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a way that is “patently offensive,” appeals to minors’ “deviant or morbid interests” and lacks “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

“What’s a deviant violent video game?” asked Justice Antonin Scalia, who was the law’s most vocal opponent on Tuesday. “As opposed to what? A normal violent video game?”

“Some of the Grimm’s fairy tales are quite grim,” he added. “Are you going to ban them, too?”

Justice Stephen G. Breyer took the other side. He said common sense should allow the government to help parents protect children from games that include depictions of “gratuitous, painful, excruciating, torturing violence upon small children and women.”

This is pretty remarkable, as it recalls almost exactly the well-intentioned efforts in the 1950s by progressive liberals, led by Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver (Adlai's 1956 running mate), to purge the nation of the "scourge" of horror comics.

Poor William M. Gaines, EC Comics publisher and later the founder of MAD Magazine, got caught up in Kefauver's cross-hairs and delivered an epic demonstration of the difference between law and pure aesthetic expression, attempting to explain what aesthetic "taste" means in the context of a horror comics cover in which a man is shown holding a woman's severed head by the hair in one hand and gripping a bloody ax in the other:  "A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody."  

That pretty much did them in (the comix industry cut a deal and voluntarily regulated horror comics out of existence).

As recounted in Jim Trombetta's excellent The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read!,

[T]hese proceedings record how deeply ambivalent the postwar American establishment was about the baby boom.  The good part was "move to the suburbs, have a couple of kids"; the bad part was an "alarming" increase in "juvenile delinquency."  The censorship of comic books now looks like an opening salvo in the cold war against the young, which would soon flare up in the gratuitous suppression of rock and roll, eventually generating the zombielike protractions of Vietnam.

What will censoring "violent" video games look like 50 years from now?

Perhaps Justice Kagan put it best:

“You think Mortal Kombat is prohibited by this statute?” she asked Mr. Morazzini. It is, she added, “an iconic game which I am sure half the clerks who work for us spent considerable time in their adolescence playing.”

Mr. Morazzini said the game was “a candidate” for government regulation.