Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ebook download (eBook PDF) Whose Monet?: An Introduction to the American Legal System (Academic Success Series) 2nd Edition all chapter
ebook download (eBook PDF) Whose Monet?: An Introduction to the American Legal System (Academic Success Series) 2nd Edition all chapter
: An
Introduction to the American Legal
System (Academic Success Series) 2nd
Edition
Go to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebooksecure.com/product/ebook-pdf-whose-monet-an-introduction-to-the-ame
rican-legal-system-academic-success-series-2nd-edition/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
http://ebooksecure.com/product/ebook-pdf-introduction-to-law-and-
the-legal-system-11th-edition/
http://ebooksecure.com/product/ebook-pdf-introduction-to-the-
english-legal-system-2019-2020-14th-edition/
https://ebooksecure.com/download/progress-in-heterocyclic-
chemistry-ebook-pdf/
http://ebooksecure.com/product/ebook-pdf-translational-medicine-
in-cns-drug-development-volume-29/
Cardiology-An Integrated Approach (Human Organ Systems)
(Dec 29, 2017)_(007179154X)_(McGraw-Hill) 1st Edition
Elmoselhi - eBook PDF
https://ebooksecure.com/download/cardiology-an-integrated-
approach-human-organ-systems-dec-29-2017_007179154x_mcgraw-hill-
ebook-pdf/
https://ebooksecure.com/download/empowerment-series-an-
introduction-to-the-profession-of-social-work-ebook-pdf/
http://ebooksecure.com/product/ebook-pdf-we-the-people-an-
introduction-to-american-government-12th-edition/
http://ebooksecure.com/product/ebook-pdf-african-american-music-
an-introduction-2nd-edition/
https://ebooksecure.com/download/gateways-to-democracy-an-
introduction-to-american-government-ebook-pdf/
EDITORIAL ADVISORS
Erwin Chemerinsky
Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law
Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law
University of California, Irvine, School of Law
Richard A. Epstein
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law
New York University School of Law
Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow
The Hoover Institution
Senior Lecturer in Law
The University of Chicago
Ronald J. Gilson
Charles J. Meyers Professor of Law and Business
Stanford University
Marc and Eva Stern Professor of Law and Business
Columbia Law School
James E. Krier
Earl Warren DeLano Professor of Law
The University of Michigan Law School
Robert H. Sitkoff
John L. Gray Professor of Law
Harvard Law School
Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory Solutions U.S. serves customers worldwide with CCH,
Aspen Publishers, and Kluwer Law International products. (www.WKLegaledu.com)
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or utilized by any information storage
or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information about
permissions or to request permissions online, visit us at www.WKLegaledu.com, or a written
request may be faxed to our permissions department at 212-771-0803.
Wolters Kluwer
Attn: Order Department
PO Box 990
Frederick, MD 21705
eISBN: 978-1-4548-7616-8
The Facts
Facts of DeWeerth v. Baldinger as Summarized
by the Trial Court
The Law
O’Keeffe v. Snyder
DeWeerth v. Baldinger II
POSTSCRIPT
This description could hardly be less true. There are of course some
things you will need to remember, but what really counts is your ability to
use what you remember—to pick out relevant facts, to recognize the
applicable legal rules and standards, and to state in a lawyer-like way how
courts would, or should, apply the law to the sets of facts presented. You
will be graded on your ability to apply your legal knowledge in
advocating for particular positions or outcomes. What you will be
expected to do, in short, is to engage in the same kind of legal analysis
and writing that actual lawyers engage in when handling cases for clients.
And this will often mean wrestling with uncertainty. For even though
lawyers often encounter factual situations in which the law’s application
is fairly predictable (the “rule of law” could never work otherwise), you
will find there is little demand for lawyers to spend their valuable time
analyzing these “easy” cases. The situations that particularly call for the
legal-analysis skills of lawyers (and of law students) are precisely those
in which the law and its application are not so cut and dried. Thus, your
main task in the next several years will be to absorb the law’s core
vocabulary and conceptual structure, and to evolve your skills and
abilities to put together law and fact to solve legal problems, particularly
in situations of uncertainty as to what the courts may do. In short, you
will be developing a specialized professional capacity—the capacity “to
think like a lawyer”—and to act accordingly. It is toward developing this
capacity that your classroom preparation and instruction will be aimed. In
these materials we will be taking a first look at the kinds of things that are
to come.
To present a picture of the law’s typical operation and the lawyer’s
role in it, we will follow the progress, from beginning to end, of an actual
case. We will trace the various legal problems that this case raised as it
was litigated through the court system. Let’s start with the following news
story:
There is nothing in this news account that would cause any great
amount of excitement among most readers of the local daily newspaper.
Yet for the people behind this story, the odyssey of Claude Monet’s
impressionist painting of a wheat field was a matter of enormous
importance. The resulting lawsuit went on for a number of years and,
very likely during its slow progress, it often dominated the thoughts of
the people whose lives were caught up in it, probably making for many
restless nights. Law is a serious business.
As you read the unfolding legal story behind this news account, and
discuss it in class, keep in mind that law school orientation has several
goals. The immediate goal is to help you understand what it is that your
professors will be trying to do for you during the coming semesters—and,
also very important, what they will expect from you.
Law school orientation is not, however, merely your introduction to
law school. It is your beginning in your new profession—the profession
of law. Over the next several years you will prepare for your new
professional role not merely by “learning law,” but, just as importantly,
by acquiring a deep professional sense of what it means to be a lawyer,
and of the vital role of law and legal process in our democracy. While
most lawyers’ time is spent not in lawsuits but in activities such as
transactions and counseling, where the goals are precisely to avoid
litigation, these materials will follow the tasks of lawyers who are
engaged in a lawsuit. The reason for this choice is that, during your first
months of law school, your primary task will be to read and understand
the decisions that courts have rendered in lawsuits, specifically in
appeals. (Law students and even some of their professors sometimes ask
why so much of law school is devoted to reading, analyzing, and learning
to deal with appellate cases when a relatively small part of actual law
practice is spent on appeals. The answer of course is because, in our legal
system, appellate decisions are where the law is.)
In any event, the main focus of the discussion in these materials will
be on those aspects of litigation that are essentially similar to lawyers’
core activities in virtually all areas of practice: gathering facts,
ascertaining the law, preparing documents, counseling the clients, and
strategically applying legal materials to the solution of practical
problems. As you follow the steps that the lawyers took in the course of
one particular lawsuit, you will begin to form a more definite idea of what
it is that lawyers do (and should do), the ways we serve our clients, and
the benefits we can provide to the people of the society in which we live
and from whom we earn our livings.
Finally, the case discussed in these materials presents opportunities
for you to consider the ethical or moral dimension of the lawyer’s job—
and the tension that sometimes exists between a lawyer’s duty to the
client, on one hand, and the lawyer’s professional and individual duty to
promote justice, on the other hand. In our lawsuit over Monet's Champs
de Blé à Vétheuil, for instance, you will see that the appellate court’s
ultimate decision was, bluntly, to cancel a woman’s property rights in a
painting, which had been in her family for decades, and to declare
somebody else to be the owner. The appeals court did this even though,
by that point, there was no longer any serious legal question that the
woman who lost the case was the rightful owner of the painting under the
applicable state law. She ended up with nothing.
The appellate court had legal reasons, of course. As you will see, it
based its decision on a legal principle known as finality: Courts generally
refuse to correct their mistakes after a judgment becomes final. There is,
of course, much to be said for a rule of finality—lawsuits cannot go on
forever. Still, you might wonder how it can be “justice” for a court to take
away an innocent person’s property rights when the applicable law makes
her ownership clear. Even though the appellate court appears to have
“stayed within all the rules,” did it do the right thing?
The reason for bringing this to your attention now is this: You are
preparing to become a lawyer. Like many law students, you are very
likely drawn to law (at least in part) because you place a high value on
“justice.” If so, good. But here is the question: Do you think you will be
able to do a better job of achieving justice than the legal professionals
who litigated and decided the case of the stolen Monet? Undoubtedly, it is
too early for you to say, but it is not too early to ask. On the contrary, the
earlier the better, and you are urged to ask yourself this question
repeatedly as you read the materials that follow, and as you continue your
progress through law school. You may not always be able to give a great
answer, but you will surely become a better lawyer for trying.
Excerpted with permission from Entertainment Law Reporter © 1987 Entertainment Law Reporter
Publishing Company, September 1987.
o ne day, out of a clear blue, Edith Baldinger received a demand
from somebody in Germany directing that she give up one of her
most prized possessions, a painting by Claude Monet. The person
making the demand, Gerda DeWeerth, claimed to be the true
owner. The Monet painting was very valuable, worth more than half a
million dollars, so this startling claim by a perfect stranger was no trifling
matter. Because a woman from thousands of miles away had gotten into
her head that she owned the Monet, Mrs. Baldinger suddenly found she
was on the verge of being sued—and would be forced to defend herself at
law. She was about to be sued by a person she had never even heard of
and certainly had never knowingly harmed. To top it all off, Mrs.
Baldinger had bought the painting in complete honesty, had paid a fair
amount of money for it, and had possessed it for many, many years
without even a hint that somebody else might own it.
Mrs. Baldinger needed a lawyer. She needed to find out what her
legal rights were, and she needed advice as to what to do next. And, of
course, she needed somebody to take the proper steps to assert her rights
and protect her legal interests in court once a lawsuit was commenced.
To provide legal consultation and advice, she chose Edward M. Sills,
Esq.,1 a member of the New York bar then associated with the large and
highly regarded law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison,
in New York City. Once Mrs. Baldinger had retained Mr. Sills and his
firm as her legal counsel, Mr. Sills had at least two important jobs:
THE FACTS
[A]fter a case has been tried and the evidence has been sifted…, a particular fact may be
as clear and certain as a piece of crystal or a small diamond. A trial lawyer, however,
must often deal with mixtures of sand and clay.
—Justice John Paul Stevens2
When a new client comes into a lawyer’s office, the lawyer usually
knows nothing about the facts of the client’s situation. The lawyer needs
to know the legally relevant facts, and it is up to the client to give the
lawyer the basic picture. Do not, however, assume that this means it is the
client’s job to make sure the lawyer is adequately informed. On the
contrary, as every good lawyer is well aware, clients are very apt to
provide only a mass (or mess) of facts, and to make little distinction
between the legally relevant, the totally irrelevant, the crucial, the
inconsequential, and so on. Clients are not noted for their ability to recall
and communicate the legally important facts. Memories must be dredged
up, often from the fairly distant past, about events whose legal aspects the
client probably never noticed in the first place. The farther back the
events go, the more tricks the clients’ memories are likely to play—either
innocently or intentionally. Like all human beings, clients tend to recall
the more favorable facts with great vividness while the unfavorable bits
and pieces seem to slip away.
In most cases, even the client does not have direct knowledge of
many relevant parts of the transactions or events that are the basis of a
dispute. For instance, when Mrs. Baldinger first consulted Mr. Sills, she
probably did not have the faintest idea what basis Mrs. DeWeerth might
have for claiming to own the painting. She probably had no idea there
were some dark dealings in the painting’s past and, indeed, was most
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the
United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms
of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying,
performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this
work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes
no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in
any country other than the United States.
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.F.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of
other ways including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.