The Life of Mrs. Pulley

Excuse me, Your Honor, what ever happened to justice?

Last night we got our motions for summary judgment back from our Professor. The class we are taking is a hands-on class, Pretrial Litigation, where we act as lawyers in a firm and work with a partner on a case. There are six "firms" in all, three defense teams and three plaintiff teams. Our Professor is the judge for the case.

A little history on this makes this story a little more frustrating for those involved. On the first day of class we were supposed to pick partners to work with for the rest of the semester. My friends Matt & Dave are in the class with me. The first day of class Matt leaned over to me and told me that he was going to be partners with Dave so I would have to find another partner in the class. Matt can be a little clueless as to whether what he says is rude. I just kind of smiled and thought to myself, "It's not worth a response since I don't want to be his partner." Matt is a very lazy guy and if he can get someone else to do his work he will jump at the chance. To make a short story shorter, I ended up with a great partner and will probably get an A in the class because we make such a good team and Dave ended up with Matt.

Tuesday night Dave told me that he got Matt's section of the motion and when he read it over noticed that not a single case was cited in his argument. This is pretty much a huge no-no in motions. If you discuss a rule, you have to cite to the case you got the rule from. Apparently Matt just stated the elements of fraud like they were the gospel truth and cited nothing as to where he came up with these elements. Then he went to discuss the facts of the case and how it applied to the elements with no other rules or applications used. This is not an acceptable motion on any level, not to mention it could be construed as plagiarism. None of this however compares to what the outcome of all of this turned out to be.

So we got our papers back and we are graded individually for the sections we did of our firm's motion. Matt ended up not only passing but getting a B-. Dave who had worked on everything other than the one argument that Matt kind of completed, he got 4 points lower. It would seem to me that even if there was a curve on the assignment, that Matt's should be the low threshold instead of the median grade. It would be an understatement to say Dave was upset. I really felt for him, he worked so hard on the assignment and this is what he got.

I think he should ask the Judge to recuse himself.

posted by Aimee @ 1:49 PM