I really hope Hardin hammers this fact home again and again going forward.
The only reason this case even (spitting in the face of the letter of the law) got sent back to Utah was Russhole's lies about imaginary witnesses who don't even exist.
I remember in the Swift book Russell says something like "America is a common law system, counties look to other counties, states to other states"
That is actually true, even though I don't think Russhole fully grasps why this is. I think he is misinterpreting what "common law" actually means, although a lot of people, even intelligent people, often do. There is, however, a weight of authority from precedent. There's binding precedent, which is what a court is obligated to follow, and that is generally published opinions from a court superior to them. There's
stare decisis, where a court, even the Supreme Court, has some deference to its own prior decisions even when it has the authority to overrule its own previous decisions.
After that, though, the lower level is persuasive authority. At the top of that is other courts interpreting the same body of law. Some of that authority is more persuasive than others. For instance, an opinion written by Richard Posner, formerly of the Seventh Circuit (and probably one of the smartest judges never to be on SCOTUS), would be at least taken very seriously by another court even if it ultimately declined to adopt his view.
Well below that are state court opinions from other states about their own state's laws.
Beneath even that, you have opinions from foreign countries or from long-dead English judges about long-standing principles of law. You will indeed sometimes see citations to judges like Aharon Barak, formerly President of Israel's Supreme Court, or Lord Denning, or similar grey eminences. This kind of authority is rarely cited as the underlying basis for a decision, and more to bolster the opinion's merit as somehow following a universal tradition of law or deriving from the very basics.
At the very bottom, you have things like treatises and legal dictionaries and authorities that are tertiary at best and mostly synthesize the opinions of others.
And at the very bottom below the very bottom, you have things like law review articles and stuff like that. Don't underestimate even that, though. The Supreme Court, and specifically Antonin Scalia, the author of the opinion in
D.C. v Heller, liberally cribbed from and directly cited Eugene Volokh's law review article
The Commonplace Second Amendment.
So while my opinion of Russ's legal acumen remains low, he displays at least enough ability to understand basic concepts that his continual pleas of being too dumb a retard to understand what courts or adverse parties are requesting of him are absolute utter bullshit.
He knows what he's doing. His ratface doesn't excuse that.
