LegalEagle's Devin Stone Answers Law Questions From Twitter

I'm Devin Stone, a practicing lawyer

and adjunct law professor

and host of the Legal Eagle Law Channel,

and I'm here to answer your questions from Twitter.

This is Law Support.

[upbeat music]

From @Grainneuaill, Where is the line

between hate speech and free speech?

Actually, there is no line.

A lot of countries take different philosophies

when it comes to hate speech, but in the United States,

hate speech has the same kind

of First Amendment protections as most speech.

Now, there are some quasi-exceptions to that.

When it comes to certain crimes,

you can get an enhancement if it was done

for a racially or hate-related reason,

but for the most part,

just when we're talking about free speech,

hate speech is free speech,

and you can love it or hate it,

reasonable minds will differ on that one.

From airbagmoments, Serious question for lawyers:

If I threaten my judge with death in the courtroom,

isn't he/she now prejudiced against me

and must be replaced?

So this is a great example

of the difference between prejudice and undue prejudice.

Courts are designed to prevent things

that cause undue prejudice in the courtroom.

We don't want an outside influence

unfairly prejudicing the judge, the jury, or anyone else.

But what happens inside the courtroom

is pretty much fair game.

That might be prejudicial,

but that's not unfair or undue prejudice.

So don't go around threatening the judge with death.

Whatever happens in court can and will be used against you.

From blueroadearth, Why was OJ found not guilty

in criminal court but liable in civil court?

This question was phrased very well,

because they show the difference between liability

and criminal liability or guilt in this context.

Now, the standard in a criminal case

is beyond a reasonable doubt.

So if someone is found not guilty,

it doesn't mean that they didn't commit a crime.

It just means that the prosecution didn't meet their burden.

Now, in the civil context,

you're trying to make the victim's whole

for the damages that you have caused them,

and that's exactly what the estates

of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman did with OJ Simpson.

Even though the state was not successful

in criminally prosecuting OJ Simpson,

they were successful in filing a civil suit,

where the standard is only a preponderance of the evidence.

Basically, more likely than not.

From @marzobound, When is a grand jury

used over a regular jury

if it's just ordinary people either way?

So the jury that actually decides

whether someone is guilty or not is called a petit jury.

P-E-T-I-T.

It's Latin, don't ask.

A grand jury, on the other hand,

is actually a much lower bar.

A grand jury is used by prosecutors

to decide whether to indict someone.

And the reason that people often say

a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich

is because it's completely one-sided.

It's really just a basic check to decide

whether the case can go forward.

It doesn't actually decide

whether someone's guilty or not be.

Bbrooks4791 asked, Why not testify if you're innocent?

Why plead the 5th if you're innocent?

This applies to anyone.

It does actually apply to anyone.

Just because you are invoking the Fifth Amendment,

which is the protection against self-incrimination

and being forced to testify against yourself,

that doesn't mean that you committed any crimes.

Maybe you don't want to testify

because that might open you up to unrelated crimes.

You might be innocent of the thing you're accused of

but might be guilty of a whole bunch of other things,

or you might be completely innocent

of everything and just not want to testify.

You might be really bad on the stand,

so be glad that if you're ever accused of a crime,

you aren't going to be forced to testify against yourself.

You have the option not to testify.

From MurkTheMods, How do Draft Kings and Fan Duel

get around anti-gambling laws?

So for a long time, Fan Duel and Draft Kings

were completely illegal across the entire U.S.,

except for fantasy-related sports betting.

Those are generally considered games of skill.

However, when it comes to general betting on a sports book,

that was considered gambling and was illegal until 2018.

When the Supreme Court struck that law down,

it was left up to the states.

And now, there have been a lot of states that have said,

We are totally fine with people gambling in our states.

We would really like the tax revenue.

And as a result, it's now legal to use online websites

like Fan Duel and Draft Kings.

From iShould12, How much of a difference is there

between a guilty plea versus no contest?

So if you are accused of a criminal violation,

you have a couple options

if you don't want to go to trial.

You could just enter a plea of guilty,

but sometimes you have the option to plead no contest.

Effectively, in the criminal context,

you're treated exactly the same as if you had pled guilty.

If your crime harmed someone and they then sued you

after you pled guilty, well, you would be civilly liable

for whatever damages you caused,

almost automatically, because the standard

in a criminal case is so much higher than a civil case.

But if you plead no contest,

they have to prove that you are liable in the civil context.

Generally speaking, if the option is available,

a smart defendant will plead no contest rather than guilty.

From RedRollins1, You know why there are so many

frivolous lawsuits in America?

So I think that people vastly overestimate

how many frivolous lawsuits there are.

It's a lot of selection bias going on.

You're not gonna hear about a breach of contract case

that involves a vendor who got 10,000 industrial widgets

when he ordered 12,000 industrial widgets,

and some of them were nonconforming.

You're not gonna hear about that because it's super boring,

but you are gonna hear about the most ridiculous cases

that are out there, the most frivolous cases,

because those are the ones that are interesting

and are going to make news.

From BetterTEc_h, And lo and behold,

UMG sues for fake Drake and The Weeknd song generated by AI,

but whom can it sue apart from the company

that made the AI?

Artists do often have rights to their likeness,

and sometimes, even the rights to how they sound,

but we are entering a brave new world

where the law is going to come down

in terms of what constitutes infringement or not.

It's gonna be an interesting outcome,

because it's not at all obvious

where that's gonna come down.

Cdashiell asks, Can you actually avoid being sued

by simply avoiding being served papers?

That would be a ridiculous loophole.

I agree, that would be ridiculous,

and generally speaking, that's not the case.

What happens is if you avoid service for long enough,

you get to do what's called substitution of service,

where instead of physically handing

the service papers to someone,

you just put it into a newspaper,

and then you might not even know

that the proceedings have started.

And believe me, you do not wanna have a lawsuit

against you and not participate.

What happens is a default judgment where you just lose,

and you didn't get a chance to defend yourself.

Don't play games except service and just hire a lawyer.

It's the better way to do it.

From xtraspicytums, Why are there so many

accident lawyer billboards in LA?

Can someone enlighten me here?

Because once I started noticing them, I can't stop now.

There was actually a Supreme Court case in the 1970s

that allowed lawyers to advertise on billboards.

Before that, the law said they couldn't.

And look, if you are going to advertise

related to car accidents,

putting up a billboard is probably the best way to do it.

Query whether you are creating more accidents,

but that's just what we call a virtuous cycle.

You're creating your own market, so that sounds great.

From @quasiasher, Wait, how is Jury Duty,

the TV show, remotely legal?

Waivers, lots and lots of waivers.

From @yuliettecai, Spare tips to make

studying law less boring, please.

I would say this.

Behind every single case is a story.

And unless you are studying civil procedure,

you can basically ignore the procedure of a case

and just focus on the story of what happened.

Whether you're talking about a breach of contract

or a horrible accident, there's probably something

really interesting going on in the background,

and it makes it a lot easier to remember

and it makes it more interesting to study as well.

From @hbnw7, Why does the law

have to be complicated and expensive?

Question mark, question mark, question mark.

It's because lawyers hate you,

and they wanna make an example of you.

You, in particular.

Lawyers get a lot of flack.

Our job is to be careful.

And the thing is, reality is really complicated.

There's a lot of stuff that can go wrong.

If you're writing a contract or you're writing a law,

you have to make sure

that you cover all of the different edge cases.

And not only that, language is really complicated,

especially the English language.

So there's a million different cases

about what constitutes a chicken.

What happens if a boat has the same name as another boat?

What happens if you write a law and you forget a comma?

All of those things have absolutely happened.

Judges, juries, and lawyers have to try and figure out

what to do when something is ambiguous,

and the world is ambiguous all the time.

From springtamige, How do lawyers ethically defend

their client when there is, say, video evidence

of them trying to run over a person twice?

Everyone is entitled to a good defense.

And there are a million different reasons

and ways that a lawyer might defend even a guilty person,

even if they think that person is guilty.

Maybe the prosecutor is trying to convict someone

and get a sentence that's way, way too high.

We don't want someone who's accused

of petty burglary to face the death penalty.

And so there are a lot of different degrees

that you can use to defend someone,

regardless of whether they're guilty or not,

and everyone deserves a reasonable defense.

Shubhgautam52, Will AI replace lawyers?

You probably don't want an AI lawyer anytime soon.

A lawyer is not just simply a machine

that knows what the law is.

A lawyer is a person with theoretically

years of expertise that can help you

strategically to achieve your goals.

And that's not something that AI

is well-positioned to replace anytime soon.

What I suspect is going to happen

is that AI is going to make a lot

of the drudgery of practicing law way easier,

and it will allow lawyers to focus

on the really value add stuff

and allow them to think strategically

and to better represent their clients in the future.

So I welcome our AI overlords.

From Dean_Hare_Photo,

When does attorney/client privilege end

and that the lawyer is a co-conspirator begin?

Well, there is a law on point,

and that is called the crime fraud exception.

If a lawyer helps a client engage in fraud,

then the attorney-client privilege is pierced.

And theoretically, if the lawyer really

is engaging in criminality,

then they can become a co-conspirator.

From ButterflyBabes5, Why is perjury not enforced?

So many are saying nothing will happen

to #AmberHeard for lying under oath.

Then what's the point of taking the oath?

So first of all, perjury is actually enforced.

Perjury being lying under oath.

That being said, it's really hard to convict someone

of perjury just because you lost a civil case.

That doesn't mean that you engaged in lying.

And in fact, even in the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp context

where there was a counter suit and Johnny Depp won,

that doesn't necessarily mean that anyone

on the other side of that was necessarily lying.

And generally speaking,

prosecutors have better things to prosecute

than a marginal case of potential perjury.

From malihaness, How do lawyers just know the law?

Like I had to learn the nitty-gritty

of one law and it drove me nuts.

You're telling me law students just learn every law

and then some international law?

Lawyers rarely know every law.

The body of American law that's out there is just,

it's too huge.

And it's not possible for any one person to know.

What tends to happen is, you know the law that you use

in practice all the time.

Say a prayer for all the lawyers out there,

because if you come to us with a novel question,

we're probably not gonna know the law

off the top of our head and we're gonna have to research it.

And frankly, you want it that way.

From Peter Unwin, When a driverless car is involved

in an accident, who should be responsible?

When a driverless car gets into an accident,

there are two potential avenues of liability.

One is negligence and the other is product liability.

When it comes to product liability, basically,

if you put a product into the stream of commerce,

you're what's called strictly liable

for any damages that that product causes.

A manufacturer could also be liable

based on a negligence theory,

that there was some industry norm

they should have followed and they didn't.

But there are a million other people

that might also be liable under a negligence theory.

Maybe there was another driver who was responsible.

It's gonna be a case by case basis,

but those are gonna be the leading theories

under which someone's going to be liable.

From NancyGerlach1, How does Supreme Court

choose to hear a case?

That is a fascinating process.

The short answer there is that of the nine justices,

four of them have to agree to take up a case.

You cannot appeal to the Supreme Court as a matter of right.

The Supreme Court has to issue

what's called a writ of certiorari.

In other words, they only decide what cases they hear.

Now, on what basis do the Supreme Court Justices decide?

Often, if there's a conflict between the states,

if there's a matter of supreme national importance,

like we saw in Bush versus Gore or Roe versus Wade.

Sometimes, they'll take on a case just because

they want to interpret a law or statute

the way that they want to interpret it.

From Lesliew string of numbers,

Can there even be a real crime in the metaverse

if it does not translate into a real crime

in the physical universe?

Well, there's all kinds of crimes in the real world

that do not involve a physical act.

There's the civil action of defamation,

and that can happen in the real world or in the metaverse.

If you meet the elements of a crime in the metaverse,

I would suspect that that crime is going to be prosecuted

in the same way that it would be prosecuted

in real life too.

From friendofgandalf, Why is there a statute

of limitations for crimes?

The reason the statute of limitations exist

is because after a whole lot of time has passed,

often, it can be really hard to find evidence.

It might be impossible to find witnesses.

So it's a balancing act.

We wanna punish the guilty,

but we don't wanna punish the innocent.

So we have a statute of limitations to make sure

that it's fair for a defendant

to be able to defend themselves

in a case where a lot of time has passed,

and otherwise, they wouldn't be able to defend themselves.

From StoveAllergy, When lawyers say something in court

and object to it and the judge tells the jury

to disregard that, do they think

it's deleted from their brains?

No, definitely not.

Lawyers are fully cognizant of the fact

that things that happen in court,

even when you get eliminating instruction from the judge,

it's impossible for anyone

to literally forget what has happened.

That being said, a judge knows when you're screwing around.

And if the judge thinks that you are intentionally

violating the decorum of the court,

the judge will use something called contempt.

And sometimes, lawyers go to jail

over things that they did in a courtroom.

Kollackwalker asks, It's like appeal, appeal, and appeal

until you get the answer you like.

Is that justice?

How many appeals do you get?

So generally speaking, you only get one appeal.

Now, theoretically, there are different courts of appeals,

so you might theoretically get one more shot at the apple,

but courts of appeal that are above

the intermediate court of appeal are like the Supreme Court,

and they only take the cases that they want.

So it's very rare to go past one appeal.

Alright, that's all of our questions.

I hope you learn something today, and until next time.

I'll see you in court.