McDonalds Coffee Lawsuit

[gmatov]

Thanks, Adam,
I wasn't being picky. Just that, as I said, if a concern had one thing going, or coffee and bagels, or danish, or whatever, it would be harsher to penalize the corner shop than a "faceless" corporation.
Actually, in your last, you mention 2 days profits, whether for each or not, and that I could countenance. Whereas, for McDs, the coffee profit "must" be a miniscule proportion of their profits (although, again, if they refuse to throw away what we would call stale coffee, because "Our coffee's lousy, anyway, why throw away good money?", it would be pure profit)).
The "corner coffee shop", and we do have them here, would be out the cost of materials,the labor, the rent, the pro-rated permit fees, etc. To fine, or award damages for his daily profit would be an undue hardship for him. I am not sure our courts take such things into consideration. A jury may, witness "Twelve Angry Men", a 40 year old movie.
I do beg to differ with you on Enron. Fastow has just been charged with more counts of screwing every body. I do believe he was the CFO and they are saying he came up with all the schemes to0 screw the state of CA, as well as all the rest of the country out of BILLIONS. Of which, no one knows where the hell the billions went. All anyone doesknow is that Ken Lay's wife went on Oprah's show(I think it was Oprah. Hey, I'm an old fart. I can't remember everything.) and cried, yes, we're broke, we used to be worth 3 BILLION dollars, and we're down to a few hundredd million.
Actually, I would not be averse to seeing some companies totally driven out of business. There are some so overtly crooked that it is only some legal practitioners who can confound the judges( I won't say the juries, because they rarely reach a jury) and cause the judge to, maybe put a restrianing order on them,while they research to see if maybe they did have the preponderence of law on their side. Witness( I hate that word) the boiler shops, stock manipulators who move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, send their "Ill gotten Gains" to off shore banks, get hauled into court, pay a pittance of a fine, and say, " We didn't do that, Your Honor, and we promise never to do it again." And you know that occurs on a daily basis.
BTW, you haven't answered whether going to college with only one goal in mind, a law degree, had 7 years of strictly law related studies or not. I just asked my neighbor about his son, and he said, no, you could take sand box for 4 years, pass your LSATS, and study law for the next 3 and be a lawyer in waiting, although his boy did sudy pol sci and related courses..
I think iot's entirely possible you may hear, some day,of Judge Jury, his actual last name. I am glad he's a labor lawyer, actually with the union I belong to though I know G Bush will never appoint him to anything. Poor boy's a Democrat, doncha know.
My name is George BTW. I needed a unique with my local ISP, as did we all then, rather than ralph23456@ whatever.
"Irregardless"(do not regard?), nice talking to you. And the other Texican isn't as bad as the kid says. Well, a little prissy. Wish you much success in your chosen profession

[gmatov]

Adam,
I hate to pick on you, but if you wish to be a lawyer, why the hell aren't you familiar with gunlaws in Texas? We are not talking Waco, we are talking CA and MA, Massachusetts, if that's the correct spelling.. CA passes a law, MA says we can beat that. Do you know that to carry a cartridge in MA is illegal? Do you think that is ridiculous? Do you realize that the country was born in MA? And they say uh-uh, guns is bad, that's a no-no. When the 2nd amendment falls, the 1st is right behind. Actually, the 1st has suffered enough with the Patriot Act, and Patriot 2 will seal the coffin..

[adam]

When deciding the case, as well as in determining damages, the jury is instructed to take into consideration any facts presented at trial or basically anything that is common knowledge ie: if a shop only sells coffee than 100% of their rent goes towards effectuating coffee sales. Also, you cannot prevent a juror from letting their judgement be swayed by some extraneous factor. Lawyers will often ask questions of witnesses that they know will be stricken from the record if they answer. Sometimes this is even more powerful in the mind of a juror. When someone tells you not to look at something, what's the first thing you do? Jurors are everyday people. They realize that in any given case, they could potentially be the one on trial, so by nature they try to make their decisions fair. Yes, the system does take into account the factors you mentioned.

Twelve angry men is a great movie but not realistic, as if any hollywood law movie is. The actions of the jurors in that movie were clearly in error. You can't go out and buy a knife similar to the murder weapon just to prove to the other jurors how common such a knife is. That is for the lawyers to do. The jurors are only supposed to focus on the facts presented at trial.

I'm just finishing up my first year of law school. We are covering the general areas of the law such as Contracts, Torts, Property etc... I'm sure there is plenty of caselaw on gun rights but its not exactly something you want to study in law school, its too narrow a field. Its also something I'm not particularly interested in.

Like I said, all that is required to practice law is a 3 year law degree and a passing score on the respective Bar Exam of your state. In order to get into law school you must have an undergraduate degree, which is pretty much a 4 year program everywhere. You can get your undergrad in anything you want. Even for those people with their hearts set on litigation, law schools do not even recommend necessarily getting an undergraduate degree in pre-law. It doesn't hurt, but you will just re-learn most of it again in law school anyway. If you do major in pre-law then no, you do not take law classes exclusively, and in fact its really only about 50-50. Your first two years you take your basics and must complete courses within certain areas like Arts, Sciences, Math, etc... Different programs have different degree requirements. For instance, Pre-Law is very heavy in English.

I have my undergradute in English and at one point I was a business major.

[txpharoah]

Gun laws here in Texas are a bit more liberal than in other places.

All I've got to say is God Bless Texas. I'd go into it more, but wouldn't want to swipe the thread away from spilled coffee.

[gmatov]

Tex, both of you,
Point taken. Stick to the subject. Problem is "we" tend to preach to the choir, as, video spoken here, audio discussed only insofar as it relates to sync in video convert, etc. Oh, well.
And I hold no malice toward Texas. I just think it's ridiculous that all them cow punchers have to wear baseball caps now.