Veritas et Mendacium?

When I practiced law, I had to take the facts as they came and craft the most credible story that served my client’s interests. In civil rights law, I was often representing individuals who had no personal stake in the outcome, unless you count scratching the same itch that moved me to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

That made it a bit more probable I had a case made of solid gold in that every material fact on my side was true. That was particularly satisfying when surprises surfaced during the trial.

I was representing a Mexican-American who had been demoted for no apparent reason than the desire to have only Anglos in supervisory positions. At the discovery phase of the trial, the company we were suing had been unable to produce documents that would have allowed us to go over the workforce and count the customary proxy for ethnicity, Spanish surnames. I figured there would be so few Anglo surnames on the scut work level that we could go find them.

(Speaking of names, I have used none and I’ve also purposely jumbled the facts in this account. I always try to hide parties to litigation who were not already public figures whether my connection to the case was as a lawyer or as a judge. Whether there was so much press coverage the parties became involuntary public figures is a judgment call made easy here because the amount of press coverage was zero.)

Without the documents, we had nothing but the dueling recollections of what the work force had looked like several years prior to the trial. Naturally, a couple of Mexican-Americans had been promoted since we sued them.

OK, not exactly “nothing.” We had the rule that was AWOL in the Trump impeachment, the one that says failure to produce documents can be used against the party in control of the documents. In our case, the company had the documents, was required to keep the documents by prudence if not by law, and had ways to recreate the documents not available to us.

On the company’s side, they were able to account for the disappearing documents because they had a fire. Too convenient, you say? That’s what I thought, but the small town fire chief was…

Related posts:

Maybe you have an old phone lying around inside a drawer, buried beneath old cables and tech supplies you don’t need anymore. You keep saying you’ll get around to it, but it just sits there…

If you are a functional programming enthusiast or a JavaScript or Scala developer, you might have heard about curried functions. What exactly is currying, how are they useful, how can I implement a…

I love it when the home smells like a holiday. Cosy, warm and inviting with all of my favourite scents in one place! I must admit that most of us are addicted to certain chemical fragrances just…