Unit 3. Discussion Points

Task 1. Discuss the following points with your fellow students:

1. personal safety when away from home

2. personal safety when at home

3. crime rate in your neighborhood

4. crime rate in this country

5. the ways to make your life safe

6. the means of self protection

7. the methods to prevent your place from being burglarized

8. people’s confidence in the law-enforcement system

9. effectiveness of law-enforcement agencies in protecting citizens

Task 2. Give a short newspaper review on:

Protection of citizens against property crimes

Drug related crimes

Weaknesses of the law-enforcement system in protecting citizens

Means of helping victims of crimes

Siege mentality and ways to overcome it

Remember that your interview should appeal to the interests of the interested readers. It can be neutral, emotional, and descriptive. Prove your point of view.

Task 3. Work in pairs. Discuss any of crime related problems of today. You may speak about:

• personal safety

• technical means to protect a person or a place he/she lives in

• the way the police treats the victims of crime

• the reluctance to file complaints

• your own experience in dealing with police or criminals

One of the students is supposed to introduce a subject of mutual interest; the other student disagrees or agrees with his partner’s point of view.

Task 4. Speak on the topic: “I won’t let criminals run my life because…”

Task 6. Team work. Case Study: The following situations are based on real cases from the federal courts. Consider the arguments, and then decide how you would rule. Compare your answers with actual case results.

Robert took his two sons camping in Yellowstone National Park. A park brochure warned them to beware of bears. "Don't worry," Robert said. "The bears are more afraid of you than you are of them." But sure enough, a grizzly invaded their tent during the night and mauled Robert's face and chest. Robert sued the park. "Judge," he said, "the govern­ment's Park Service should pay for my injuries."

Would you rule for Robert or the Park Service?

Chapter 4. Too Many Lawyers? unit 1. Giving the summary of the text Text 1

Task 1. Answer the questions:

1. Why do people need lawyers?

2. What is a precedent?

3. What is a statute?

Task 2. Read the text to get the main idea paying special attention to the underlined parts of the text (key words and word combinations)

The American legal system may be nearing the point of collapse. It is coughing and wheezing and has already turned into something far different from what it was even 20 years ago. Its ailments are not minor.

The courts have taken on more responsibilities at a time when their ability to handle them has dimin­ished. Congress and the state legislatures have encouraged this. The bar has pocketed its profits and let things slide. And the uneasy public has been told to leave such matters to the professionals, the same pro­fessionals responsible for five-year trial delays and street criminals turned loose to commit new crimes before they are sentenced for their old ones.

Now is the time — before it is too late — to examine and do something about the serious problems in our legal system:

Overbooked. There were 70,906 lawsuits filed in federal courts in 1966; by 1986 the volume had more than tripled to 254,828. No other country has seen such a volume of lawsuits. The causes are too many laws, too many lawyers, and some dangerous attitudes on the part of judges. The long-term solution is not to create more courts and judges. That is like trying to solve traffic jams by building more freeways, which just encourages more traffic.

A century ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., observed that, stripped to the essentials, the law is simply a prediction of how judges will decide cases. Now judges have become less easy to predict. Litigation has multiplied because the law is less predictable than it used to be.

Why the uncertainty? It is because judges no longer seem to have as much respect for precedent. If new cases are dependably decided as similar ones were in the past, it is possible to predict the law. But when judges expect plaudits for thinking up novel legal doctrines and each case is an opportunity to re-examine old issues from scratch, then the law is not clear at all.

The weakening of precedent in part reflects sheer volume. There now are so many courts and so many decisions that no one can keep them all straight. As the num­ber of decisions goes up, their authority has been cheapened.

More to blame than the courts, however, is that other lawgiver, the Congress. Congress increasingly hates to make hard choices, so it writes vague laws. From about the time of the Great Society in the 1960s, Congress developed a fondness for enacting broad admonitions in favor of all things good. Let us have clean air and water, full employment, full equality and so on. But let’s leave it to the courts to guess what all this means and what to do when one noble goal, written into law, conflicts with another.

The courts look for "legislative intent" in interpreting statutes. Of­ten it isn't there — or, rather, it’s simply intent to pass the buck. Dumping politically charged disputes on the judiciary not only helps crowd the dockets but also dissipates our respect for the courts as institutions above the hurly-burly of politics.

Nor have the courts run from such temptations. A generation ago, law students were taught to revere "judicial restraint," the notion that courts had a limited charter. Now many judges are confident that practically anything can be settled in a courtroom. More judges become famous for rendering "landmark" decisions than for following settled law. As a result, a lawyer finds fewer occasions to advise a client that a claim is so fanciful no court would entertain it.