“Judge, have you been studying this at all?”

I’ve written numerous posts—for example, here, here, and here—about defense attorneys trying to put on evidence of innocence during a trial, only to have trial judges shut them down cold. As I explained in those posts, this happens most frequently when the prosecutor objects to a defense lawyer’s line of questioning as calling for “hearsay.” In most cases, however, the testimony isn’t hearsay at all. So the surprised defense lawyer does his best to play educator, and tries to teach the judge about the definition of hearsay. Yet, because many judges just cannot grasp this incredibly important concept, they sustain the prosecutor’s objection in knee-jerk fashion. The defense lawyer—much like a patient whose surgeon doesn’t understand basic human anatomy—is dead in the water (or on the operating table, as it were). 

Now, I don’t mean to make light of this incredibly serious and utterly unacceptable state of affairs in legal education and, consequently, in the judiciary. But when I saw the following short video clip, I couldn’t help but think of physicist Brian Greene as the frustrated defense lawyer, and the other character in the video as the completely uneducated judge, incapable of grasping the lesson. (If the embedded video does not appear below, you can find it on YouTube by clicking here.) Enjoy.