Question for all lawyers

[stodg73]

Has a lawyer, plaintiff or defendant, ever submitted a readily available dictionary and thesaurus in a court case as evidence?



Please, no bashing this question, this is something I would like to know.

[FoxtArt]

Ordinarily, it's not evidence per se, But you can ask the court to take notice of it. It is very common to use a dictionary citation in pleadings, but a dictionary citation by itself is not necessarily all that important to a court.

At the end of the day, we have a judge-icial system. No matter what you look up online, or what answer you receive, each CO judge can do whatever-the-hell they want.

You can offer used tp as evidence, one judge will chuckle and accept it, the other will hold you in contempt. Most Colorado judges don't know or follow our own CRE in any way that would be considered consistent. They can accept things that clearly should not be accepted from one party (unnotarized written statements by people not appearing in court, for instance), then hold you to absurd standards, such as requiring you to fly in banking executives before they'll accept your bank statements as evidence, or vice versa.

Knowledge of law or precedence tails even further.

At the end of the day, what matters to your victory more than anything comes down to one simple fact: Does the judge like you more than the other party. Your judge may accept a dictionary offered as evidence without a comment, or he might go on a 10 minute rant about how important his law degree is compared to your lowly experience as a peasant. By far and large, most judges are like the bottom 30% of anyone's coworkers. Good attorneys usually don't become judges....

Standard disclaimer applies: To receive legal advice, you need to retain a Colorado Attorney.


ETA: There is a proper way to cite to a dictionary in a pleading. In any event, always identify the dictionary itself and the revision.

ETA 2: The short answer, by the way, is yes. I just wanted you to understand what happens in Courtroom A doesn't make a lick of difference in Courtroom B. You'll anger a judge if you argue what another courtroom permits. if you want to argue precedence (case law), that is fine, I'd recommend using casetext, you can use Google to get behind its paywall.

[stodg73]

Thank you very much!