Friday Frivolity—The "To Kill a Finch" Edition!

Before I started guest blogging at Patterico’s Pontifications, Patrick started a tradition of running a “Sockpuppet” post every Friday.  In that thread everyone was given permission to use multiple false nicknames impersonating other people in the thread in order to make jokes.  Like with what is in the news, you can expect someone to pretend to be Alec Baldwin, and what do you know?  Here it is.  So when I started there I continued the tradition and added something to it: a Friday Frivolity.  I found some light item and posted about it in the same sockpuppet thread.fou

Well, now that I have came back here, a couple people asked me whether I would run a sockpuppet thread and my answer was that there wasn’t enough of a commenter community here, yet.  That might change.  I have only just begun to allow comments, after all.  And really, if you want to goof around and do an obvious sockpuppet in a thread, including this one, I ain’t going to object, as long as it is obvious in some way.

But I can certainly do frivolity and for this week we have one of Cracked’s excellent lists, this time of movie lawyers who were bad at their jobs (language warning at the link, as is the case with all links to their site).  I am embarrassed to say that I have not seen enough of these movies to really appreciate much of the commentary.  In fact, I am particularly embarrassed to say that I have never seen To Kill a Mockingbird, because it is universally considered a classic.  But I have listened to a book on tape version one time when travelling back and forth from law school and my parents’ home in Texas, and presuming the author of this list is accurately describing the movie, I think this criticism is unfair:

If Peck was such a brilliant lawyer, why didn't he petition for a change of venue? Even Matthew McConaughey's character thought to request a change of venue, and he's Matthew McConaughey.

A change of venue is a legal concept that was basically developed for this very purpose. If it is believed that a fair trial cannot be obtained in the proper jurisdiction, the proceedings can be moved elsewhere "in the interest of justice." There's no way in hell Tom would get a fair trial in Whiteyville, so Peck could just petition to move things elsewhere. One could argue that since the judge has the final say on whether to grant a change of venue, he would just deny the motion for no reason other than being a racist prick, making the gesture pointless. However, Judge Taylor is shown to sympathize with Tom Robinson and holds Peck in high regard (he's actually the one who appoints him as Tom's legal counsel), so there's no reason to believe he wouldn't grant the motion.

Well, of course, the purpose of a change in venue would be to move the trial to a place where your were more likely to have an unbiased jury.  This is takes place just before World War II (at least the book does), and we are talking about Alabama, okay?  They were not talking about changing venue to Massachusetts, they were talking about finding a place in Alabama prior to the entire Civil Rights Movement, where a black man could get a fair trial when he was accused of raping a white woman.

Wow, This is Retarded on so Many Levels

How to Date a Lawyer, supposedly, and how is this thing stupid?  Well, not the least because it is also sexist, clearly written for women.  Don’t be fooled by the gender neutrality early on.  Later it is clear that they think only women would be interested in this kind of gold digging.

By the way, here is a tip.  If you are not a lawyer, don’t act like you think that a lawyer acts.  And keep it short on the lawyer jokes.  At best we might have a sense of humor about it.  At worst, we might be offended.  Why not avoid the minefield and talk about something else.