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Once had the very surreal experience while in court waiting to litigate a case to object to a higher court's jurisdiction over a case; my motion was granted, an
by nxzero 10y ago
Once had the very surreal experience while in court waiting to litigate a case to object to a higher court's jurisdiction over a case; my motion was granted, and the case was sent to the lower court.
While waiting for the above motion to be heard for over an hour, the person directly behind me was calling how the judge would respond to various matters that required the judge's opinion. Having nothing to do, since mobile device weren't allowed, I listened to the predictions made and the outcome. The predictions were wrong most of the time.
As I stated earlier, my motion to send the complaint back to the lower court was granted and it turns out that the person behind me was the judge for the lower court.
Yes, the lower court was predictably unable to predict the higher court's judgements the majority of the time.
To me, this if it holds true statistically across the legal system in a blind test of judges -- it is a major issue; normally, judges don't want to publicly rule against another judge unless it's obvious the other judge was wrong.
Strange end to my experience was that I won in the lower court and the other party failed to appeal the judgement in a timely manner; meaning my motion to dismiss the appeal was granted based on it being filed one day late by the opposing party by the higher court. Always wondered what would have happened if the higher court had heard the case and issued a judgement; lucky that never happened.
- acbabis 10y agoI was under the impression that you only have multiple courts review a case when the case is appealed. Wouldn't cases that are appealed be biased in favor of unpredictability by the fact that people believed they could be reversed?
- nxzero 10y agoHappy to address the question, but it's not clear to me exactly what the question is. In the example I provided the lower court and court above it shared jurisdiction over the case by law. Generally, upper courts for case load reasons will not hear a case that's not an appeal. In this case, the higher court considered hearing the case based on the arguments of the other party, but I won based on my arguments that as a result of the contract between the parties the lower court was explicitly the only court that had jurisdiction over the matter. For what it's worth, I'm not an attorney, just skilled at legal matters and litigation; as an example, once had a judge issue an order by phone for me and have their clerk draft the order too - ask any attorney if they've ever done that... :-)
- acbabis 10y agoThat's interesting. I wasn't aware that cases in the jurisdiction of a lower court could "skip" the lower court. And it appears I misread your earlier point. You were talking about the lower court "predicting" the higher court, and not deciding on the same cases. My point was that cases that go to multiple courts are the ones that are hard to decide, but it's moot.