Saturday, July 5, 2014

Research standards for German legal professionals?

Do you recall the last time when the excuse "well, sorry, I didn't read up on it" worked for you?
Primary school, certainly before you knew how to do a decent web search, would be the most likely set of answers for most of us.

A cynic friend of the K-Landnews has this favorite quote about the rule of law: Okay, assume we are all equal before the law, what about after the law?

To illustrate what this question might mean, here is a link to the latest ruling in the case of the German who spent seven years or so locked up mostly for being so crazy to claim his banker wife had helped people evade taxes (the ruling in German).

Because he was right, after all.

When the now released man tried to have a judge prosecuted, the court came down with the claim the judge had not done wrong because 'there was no proof the judge knew of an extensively published and widely commented on ruling by Germany's highest court banning the very same reasoning used to lock up the man' [our translation, quality: reasonably good].

When the link to the ruling made the rounds on Twitter, several users saw it necessary to state that this was not a spoof version from Germany's favorite satire web site Der Postillion.

This book (in German, link to Amazon) tells some stories of judicial error in Germany, and attempts to answer the question why so few ever become public.


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