Explicit

Baby Judge School

Published May 7, 2019, 8:00 AM

Judges now want us to know they’re human. But maybe we’d be better off if we didn’t know.

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Pushkin. One of the cooler things that happened in the last few decades is that scientists have decided that emotions are worth studying, and they found new ways to study them, not just in people, also in animals. The guy who's taken the lead with the animals is a Dutch primatologist named Franz Dawal. You know, emotions are sort of taboo topic. They used to be, at least, and so most of the time we don't explicitly discuss them. We discussed the behavior that they produce, but not the emotions themselves. That's Dwall himself. He's Dutch but works in Atlanta at Emory University. When he started out, no one thought you could study the emotions of animals. A lot of people just assumed that animals didn't have emotions and scientists shouldn't care if they did, but not supposed to talk about mental states or feelings or planning or thoughts or whatever. And so there was a taboo for one hundred years on talking about that. And it's only in the last twenty years or so that taboos being lifted, and that the more and more scientists are open about internal states, meaning emotions. They so clearly drive behavior in both animals and people, which brings me to Professor the Wall's most famous experiment. I worked with capuccin monkeys for a long time. We noticed in our lap that the monkeys were always very keenly watching what somebody else would get, not just what they themselves get for a task, but also what somebody else is getting. So the final experiment that I want to mention to you is our fairness study. This is the Wall's ted talk about that experiment. Two monkeys in cages side by side. The cages are plexiglass, so the monkey can see each other and the scientist. They're given treats for performing a task. The task is to take a rock from a researcher and hand it back to her. It doesn't sound so hard, but then you're not a monkey. The treat is a slice of cucumber. And if you give both of them cucumber for the task, the two monkeys side beside, they're perfectly willing to do this twenty five times in a row. So cucumber, even though it's really only water in my opinion, but cucumber is perfectly fine for them, perfectly fine. But then a few rounds in. One of the monkeys hands back the rock, and the researcher gives that monkey a grape, not a cucumber. Monkeys really like grapes, and the other one sees that The other monkey stares. She waits her turn. She gets the rock and hands it back, gets again cucumber. She looks back and forth between the cucumber and the other monkey. She just chucked the cucumber back at the researcher. Then she goes ape shit. The researcher keeps giving grapes to one monkey and cucumbers to the other. She tests a rock now against the wall if she needs to give it to us, and gets cucumber again. The monkey that gets cucumber explodes in anger, climbing the walls of the cage, throwing whatever she can get her paws on at the researcher. So this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here. At some deep level, monkeys expect life to be fair, and so do we. The human sense of fairness is not just some sort of mental product some sort of countient philosopher would say. Is that it's a principle that we have arrived at by reasoning and logic or something like that. No, no, there's there's a real emotion behind it. And that's why the behind all these moral principles that we have. This experiment isn't just about unfairness. To have any effect at all, the unfairness has to be out in the open. The monkey getting the cucumber needs to see the monkey getting the grape. So it's also about the relationship between transparency and unfairness. I sometimes wonder what would happen if people ever got to see all the unfairness in life, if say, some magical new technology came along that generally increase the transparency in the world. Oh wait, it just did. My name is Michael Lewis, and this is against the rules. I show about the decline of the human referee in American life and what that's doing to our idea of fairness. I was talking the other day with a woman named Musa sever She'd grown up in Slovenia when it was part of Yugoslavia, and she was there in the nineteen nineties when Yugoslavia fell apart. Hundreds of thousands were killed, millions more persecuted. Musa escaped, but with the new conviction that nothing was more important than the rule of law. Justice. She wanted everyone everywhere to have it. In two thousand and three, she moved to Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan was not an obvious upgrade on Slovenia, even at its most terrifying. Well, they had a pretty nice constitution, but that was mainly on the paper. Security services were controlling everything. A group called Freedom House had sent Musa to document what was happening in Uzbeka stands prisons. The prisons had become the Uzbek government's torture chambers. They had cattle prods and rooms where they hung you from your wrists and ankles, other rooms where they beat you with robber hoses and smothered you with plastic bags, all done in total secrecy, just like the trials that had sent people to prison in the first place. And what about the judges in the courtroom, where the judges were kind of independence? Did they have? No? No, no no. That was the old legacy of the Soviet system made prosecutors totally in charge of everything. The government. Prosecutors were in charge. The judges had zero power. They just took orders from the prosecutors. The orders were simple. Any person who gets arrested is guilty. As soon as you did something that got the police to arrest, that was it. You couldn't get out. Can you just describe like you're describing to a child, would it felt like to live in that system? Well, one person didn't matter. You didn't matter at all. So the only way how people tried to preserve their safety was they didn't stick out in any way. People had to stay hidden. Not because the Uzbeks didn't have any laws. They had their nice little constitution. What they lacked was an idea at the center of any system of justice, the independent judge, the ref in robes, the human being charged with ensuring fairness in the court of law. When you live in a country that doesn't have people like that, you wake up every day to the same emotion. Fear that there was always fearing, Yeah, fear that if you don't do what the state wants you to do, they could eliminate you. The Uzbeks didn't invent the police state. They were just more enthusiastic about it than most. But in two thousand and sixteen something changed. Muy the president died. That was his funeral. He was the only president that Uzbekistan had ever had, And the new president decided amazingly and without any great revolution, to open things up, to create basically from scratch, a legal system that included some concept of fairness in practice that meant handing actual power to the people who'd never had any The judges the refs, which sounds like it should be easy for the judges, right, You don't really think of them having to learn how to be independent. It's like breathing. You do it so long as you're allowed to. It turns out that's wrong. The younger ones are those usually to make a decision on acquittals and try to do things right. The older ones are still they find it hard. So if you're a defendant and you walk into a courtroom and you see a young judge, you're happier than if you see an old judge. Yeah, definitely, because only the new judges will acquit you. The old guys will still assume you're supposed to be sent directly to jail. It's as if they don't want their independence, or as if the Uzbek system doesn't know how to grant it to them. The Uzbeks have done all kinds of things to get the changes to work. They've invited American judges to visit to teach them about judicial independence. They've opened their courtrooms so people can watch the trials. Musa had this idea of staging mock trials so that the old guys could see what fairness looked like. So we had two trials. On both trials that defense won the case. That was such a shock the team of prosecutors, and they sent us the best. Didn't you even want to shake the hands with the team of defense. They were so pieced off, and they would be asking what happens to American prosecutor when he loses a case? Does he lose a job? Is he punished? They were an undefeated team up to that point. Yes, they never lost. They never lost because they were not supposed to lose. They're not supposed to lose, right, Changing those attitudes must not be easy. It's not easy, and you know that's why I'm there fifteen years. All of which is to say that a system of justice isn't just a bunch of laws. A system of justice lives and dies on the emotion it evokes, especially feelings about the judges, and the judges feelings about their role. So here's what happens. We're in front of a very hostile judge. The judge was appointed by Barack Obama, federal judge. These feelings can change. They're changing right here, right now, because he's given us ruling after ruling after ruling, negative, negative, negative. The uzbeks have picked a funny moment to emulate the American system of justice. They want transparency, they want the people to see the judges at work. At the same time, Americans are being encouraged to watch their judges more closely than ever, and what they see is causing some problems. So I walked in, and I mean, I think, I think I look younger than I am anyway, and so I think, you know, I think, you know, I thought a lot of people just assumed guy was, you know, in my early twenties or something. You know, this is Jeremy Fogel. He was once a judge, but not just any judge. A judge you had a gift for watching himself on the job. Presiding judge gave me a file and say here's your first case. The jury's coming in half an hour or something like that. This podcast was bound to lead to judges. They're too important to ignore, but they usually don't have much to say for themselves. By law, they're forbidden from discussing their cases. By custom, they don't typically invite you to get to know them. That's why I've come to Jeremy Fogel. He's decided that judges have no choice but to break their silence because they're being watched in new ways, and he's sort of taking the lead. Fogel was always a little odd for a judge. He went to college during the Vietnam War. He'd studied religion and wanted to become a professor, but the war or switched on something inside of him made him want to do something practical out in the world. I just felt like an academic life was going to be too cloistered, so law school was kind of something I did, almost as an afterthought. He became a public defender, taking the cases of people who couldn't afford a lawyer. He saw the unfairness of the system, the crazy inequality, the likelihood that it would treat a poor person less fairly than a rich person. Jeremy was doing what he could directify that, but he sensed that he had this thing about him that made him less than ideal for the job. You can't be the one sided advocate where you you just kind of go in and say, well, you know, my client's entirely right and these people are entirely wrong. I never felt comfortable doing that. He didn't like taking sides, which is a problem if you're a lawyer. You know, there's there's lawyers who actually believe their clients cases totally right. Then there's people who know that it isn't but they can play the role. And I wasn't ever really that comfortable playing the role at the same time. I mean, I was aware of my ethical obligations were and so I started to think about, well if you what if I were a neutral? A neutral we know now how hard they are to find others who knew. Jeremy Fogel had the same thought. In nineteen eighty six, Fogel was appointed to be a California state judge. It nerve wracking. Well, I was really nervous, you know, I didn't know what to expect. And no, I don't think I don't I know think I ever hit the gavel in my life. But but but I just I was never in a I was never in a mood where I felt like I needed to do that. He wound up running a family court without ever once using his gavel. He presided over divorces and custody battles. It was emotional, angry, ugly. If a judge had some perverse desire to be murdered by the people in his courtroom, he'd ask for family court duty. Most judges dislike family cord because it's the hot zone. Jeremy Fogel didn't just like it. He loved it. You know, you have people who are quote normal most of the time, who when they're in the middle of the divorce or not temporarily, they're temporarily insane. Right, So the ability to kind of step in and bring a little bit of order to the situation actually was something I felt very positive about. And how did you do that? I mean, I think a lot of it was just just listening and trying to figure out what's really going on. And you know, they're fighting about who gets the dog. You know, they're fighting about who gets the piano or you knows, And I just said, it's not about the piano, you know, this is this is a power struggle, you know. So I would say parties, I would bring them in for mediations. They would talk to me about this, you know, and so you know, you would kind of dig down and you could sort of see what the underlying problem was, and then you could say, well, how are we gonna how are we going to move forward here? You know, how are we going to get you folks divorce? Because that's really what needs to happen. Right, you're getting a feel for him. A born neutral, some people just are. Jeremy Fogel thinks he caught the trait from growing up with a volatile father, from wanting life at home to just calm him down anyway. Judging suits him. In nineteen ninety seven, Bill Clinton appoints him to the United States Court for the District of Northern California. It's the big time. He goes from being one of tens of thousands of state judges to one of only two thousand federal judges. He's got life tenure in this job that he totally loves. But now he's noticing things and they're pulling him outside of himself, causing him to watch himself meta judging. And it's actually really hard to be humble when you're a judge because the the everybody's countown to you. You're you're, you're wearing the robe, and you're on the bench, and everybody's you know, calling you your honor and they're you know, there's there's a lot of false deference. I think a judge you can make huge mistakes and still fool himself into thinking that he was doing great. Jeremy Fogel tried to fight this tendency by not allowing himself to forget his most terrible mistakes. I mean, the one that always comes to mind was when I was doing the Mantle Health calendar and this young man was trying to get off of conservativeship, and the doctors were saying, no, he's managed depressive and he would be dangerous to himself, and he persuaded me that he was okay, and he killed himself the next day. Judging forces you to make these horrible life and death decisions when you really don't know the right answer. Jeremy Fogel knows that he's going to be wrong sometimes, and so he thinks it's important for the people on the receiving end of his judgments to sense his humility, his humanity. He thinks judges need to be not as book smart, but people smart, so that people who leave their courtroom feel okay with what's just happened. We need a curriculum. You need to be intentional about what we're teaching judges. What kind of judges are we trying to grow? You know, the longer Jeremy Foggle is a judge, the more worried he becomes about the relationship between Americans and their judges. He's right to be worried. American judges are being threatened and challenged and exposed as never before. You to say, Senator, I would like to start by saying, unequivocally, uncategorically that I deny each and every single allegation against me today that suggested in any way that I had conversations of a sexual nature or about pornographic material with Anita Hill. Supreme Court confirmation battles. They're now just a ritual in American culture, but they have echoes in the daily lives of ordinary judges. Political attacks on jeg are on the rise, Physical attacks on judges are on the rise, and there's this new demand that judges reveal more and more of themselves in their lives to us. When I was started writing the norm was still for the justices not to grant many, if any, on the record interviews, And in fact, the Supreme Court at that time didn't even publish transcripts of the arguments on the same day, and they would just refer to the court rather than an individual justice. That's how impersonal the whole thing was supposed to be. In the early nineties. Jeff Rosen runs the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, but he used to make his living writing these wonderful profiles of Supreme Court justices. And he's watched even Supreme Court judges bow to the social pressure to let everyone get to know them. Now the transcripts are published on the same day, the justices are identified by name, and the justices are writing best selling books, and they're appearing not only on c spand but on the networks, and they're opening themselves up to being just as accessible is all the other celebrified figures in our celebrified culture. Honorable the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Something different is going on here than what goes on in the Capitol Building or in the White House. And you need to appreciate how important it is to our system of government. Jeff Rosen doesn't approve of any of this. He really doesn't approve. He thinks that would all be better off if judges retain their old mystique, if they weren't so human. But you know what, it's too late, and Jeremy Fogel thinks this might be okay. One of the things that will help strengthen traditional independence is if the public understands more about judges. People don't understand what we do, and what you see is that use caricatures, and I think the more you can kind of really paint the picture and kind of get out there's a job. You know, it's like being a doctor, it's like being a teacher, being a fighter pilot. I mean, there's a skill set that goes with it, and there's a set of values that go with it, and that it's inappropriate for people to be like making death threats. Yeah. So that part of the problem with the judge in American life is that he's so different from so much else of American life. Americans go through life doing what they feel like doing right, and it's hard to imagine themselves into a headspace where they're doing things for some reason other than they want to do them. That's right, Americans really don't understand refs. Jeremy Fogel felt that they needed to, and so in twenty eleven, when he was sixty one years old, he did something that would have surprised his younger self. He left the bench for this thing in Washington called the Federal Judicial Center, created by Congress back in the nineteen sixties to improve the nation's entire judiciary. Jeremy Fogel agrees to run it. He thinks he can use the place to train judges in better ways, so they can withstand the new transparency and be better than the caricature as we see in confirmation battles. Did you consume alcohol during your high school years? Yes, we drank beer. My friends and I the boys and girls. I liked beer. Still like beer, And I think, you know, judges all over the country are really struggling with this. I mean, like, how how do we explain to people that know? I mean, that's just not who we are, it's not what we do, and it's really important that you know that. Where do you hear that? I hear it. I just hear it from other judges, and I hear it from judges as state level and the federal level, and you're hearing this in a way you wouldn't have heard it when you started your career. That's right. So this is changing. It is changing. It is changing. It is something that's in the air. Actually, it must be more than one thing, because it's new to your nose, an entirely new smell. Has anyone told you about the what judges you for breakfast study? Tell me about it. That's Emily Basilon. She's written so much interesting journalism about the American legal system that the Yale Law School has made her a research scholar. Okay, so this is at this point kind of a famous study in law nerd world. Somebody looked at the sentencing decisions that judge is made right before lunch and right after lunch, and they found that after lunch judges are nicer, and before lunch, when presumably they're getting a little peckish, they're meaner. They give out longer sentences before lunch than after lunch. That's terrifying. Yeah, it really is, because it feels so random, not just random, disturbing. I'm not sure anyone ever really believed that human beings could be perfectly rational, but people who used to sort of believe it, or at least pretend to believe it. We created excuses for why we didn't need to pay too much attention to what was going on inside of judge's minds. I mean, they'd be hand picked to make hard decisions. How could there be anything but good at it. We had a group of judges trial court judges in Texas, really municipal judges, the kind of folks who see traffic tickets and fines for restaurants and the like. Jeffrey Klinsky teaches at Cornell Law School. He's now almost famous for these elaborate experiments involving judges, showing that when it comes to making decisions, judges suck in exactly the same way as other human beings. In one study, he wanted to see if you could screw up judges minds by putting some random number into their brains. So he gave them a scenario involving a nightclub that violated noise ordinances. The judges had to figure out a proper fine, and for half of them, we called told them that the club was named Club fifty eight, after its street address. For the other half. We told them it was Club eleven thousand, eight hundred and sixty six after its street address, and the fine was three times as high for Club eleven thousand, eight hundred sixty six. Two of the judges even in fact find the Club eleven thousand, eight hundred and sixty six dollars. They thought that, well, that's a clever number. Let's put that in and find them. You heard it here first, Never ever call your establishment club eleven eight hundred and sixty six, or mention any other random big number to a judge in the process of finding you, or for that matter, think that the judge is any more capable than other human beings at checking himself before he screws up. Eighty six percent of automobile drivers say they're less likely than the median driver to get into a car accident. People always think they're above average, especially when it comes to something they care about. But most trial judges care about is not having their rulings overturned. So we asked them, how likely are you, relative to the median judge in this room to be overturned on appeal? And indeed, eighty seven percent of them said they were less likely than the median judge to be overturned on appeal. Later on, we asked a group of judges, is how effective are you at avoiding race or gender bias in your decisions? And nine of them are better than the median judge at that. There's a long list of stuff like this. It's the same stupid stuff that all people do. The evidence has been piling up that judges are no more than human at a time when being human is maybe less flattering than it's ever been. It's funny how neatly you can map what's happening to sports referees onto judges. They've always had their biases, we're just getting better at seeing them. We now know that sports refs, who are made aware of their biases they make better calls. Same should be true of judges, right, I mean, once you know that you send people to jail longer right before lunch than you do right after lunch, you can start to watch your blood sugar. But as with sports refs, a lot of people clearly believe that judges are getting worse. It's as if we've demanded to know the truth without realizing we can't handle the truth. Wait, it's such a paradox that if we become more honest about the ways in which someone's values and politics inform their judicial decisions, that were somehow doing them a disservice. I'm talking to Emily Basilon again. You know, it's funny. It's like the system does much better if nobody's paying too much attention to it. I think that's absolutely true. I mean, there's something useful about the fiction that there is a totally separate group of people called judges. They wear black robes, they're Olympian, they're doing their own thing, and they're handing down decisions from un high It's not true, right, I mean, I really think it's like a kind of an idealized notion of the law that is essentially false, because people's prior beliefs and their values do shape the decisions they make when they have real choice. Right. And Yet I'm torn because when we had the fiction that judges were doing some totally different thing, it was easier, I think, for them to try to measure impartiality in that way, to try to adhere to that standard. But it's hard to imagine how the fiction would be restored. Oh yes, it's gone. How long have baby judges been taught about the importance of their emotions since twenty thirteen, so this is a new thing. It's a new thing. Yeah. Her name is Terry Moroney. She teaches LRD Vanderbilt. Jeremy Fogo brought her in to teach judges in the new program he created at the Federal Judicial Center Baby Judge School, they call it new Judges now learn all about the sorts of things they never used to have to think about, like the mental errors to which all human beings are prone, and their emotions. The law has maintained this very odd fiction that emotion is a relevant to law and that laws all about rationality, when pretty much every other discipline in the world understands that emotion is central to all aspects of human life. It's funny because I think historically, if you'd ask people, they said, an emotional judge can't be as fair as an unemotional judge. And what you're saying is the emotions are always there, and it's the judge doesn't recognize them, who can't who won't be fair? That's correct. Yeah, The emotional lives of judges have been discovered at roughly the same time as the emotional lives of monkeys. It turns out they have a lot in common, which is why Jeremy Fogel put emotional training at the center of Baby Judge School. I wonder if you've going back in history and tried to introduce this curriculum in an earlier point in the history of the judiciary, if people would have responded the same way. Said a really interesting thought experiment, because when I was a California State judge, I was involved in working with the California version of the FJC and actually designed a class that looked at this, and the general responds from judges at that time was, you know, I just want to do my job, and you know I don't. They didn't. They didn't say anything like I didn't I don't have any feelings, but they just said, I mean, I don't want to I don't really want to go there. I don't need to go there. And if it was somehow irrelevant to the job exactly, the fiction is collapsing or has collapsed about who what a judge is and what's inside a judge and how it judge functions, and it's going to have to be replaced by something else, right, and you're trying to you're trying to work towards what it gets replaced by exactly. I mean, that's exactly what I'm trying to do. It. The general idea of baby Judge School is to turn judges into people who can judge themselves as well as others, because the job's putting these new pressures on judges, and if judges don't learn to cope, the pressures will crack them and make the entire situation and even worse. And when you start to baby like everybody else, you're gonna get treated like that. That's exactly what the problem was. And I think that's what really upset me and ended upset a lot of judges, I know, and your respective of ideology, you know. But then so then what's the you know, what's the remedy or is there a remedy or you know, it's it just was we didn't nobody likes seeing that this whole two week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, almost by himself. Justice Kavanaugh killed any doubts that emotions inside judges might be a problem, fueled with apparent pent up anger about President Trump and the twenty sixteen election fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left wing opposition groups. The question I guess I have is how much can be done about it? Even with the best coaching I come in. I'm a baby judge. You know, I don't really care about other people's feeling. I don't look you in the eye. But I'm very reasonable and I got as, I got AIS and all my classes in law school and eight under too, my LSA t right, and I can write a really cool brief. However, I don't feel your pain. What do you do to school me? Well, you know there's a very long answer to that, and that's a lifetime of work. Carry maroney again, give me, give me an example, just one example of a of a tool. I want a tool. Yes, So one tool is situation modification. You can modify some aspects of this situation to enable you to be in greater control and give you time and space to self reflect into act. So sometimes it's as simple as taking a break. Let me stop here. Like all of these feelings and the tools that you might give them to deal with these feelings. This will make I can see why this would help make the judge feel better about about himself and about his job and able to sleep at night. Yeah, which, actually it's not going to actually affect the sentencing, is it. Well, it could actually because again, think about a judge who says, I realized that I didn't want to send it in anger. Anger makes you very punitive. That's part of what it's for. That's the tendency that it evokes in humans as to attach responsibility and to take punitive action in response to it. In a funny way, American judges are in the same situation as the judges in Uzbekistan. They're being forced to adapt to a new environment. Mister Trump tweeted last week about the Seattle judge for ruling against his executive order on immigration, only the American environment is increasingly driven by emotion, saying so the opinion of this so called judge, which essentially takes law enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned. That judge, James Robart, immediately became a target on social media, with one person even calling him a dead man walking. This is Jeremy Fogel's worst nightmare. So Judge Robart, who was the judge in Seattle who did the travel band case, got over a million emails. He got death threats, and the death threats the Marshal Service determined were credible enough that they had to give him twenty four hour protection. And what facilitated all of that was was social media. Are there other judges like Robot? Sure the Ninth Circuit judges who reviewed Robart's decision that got the same as a judge Jeremy Fogel had upset people with his rulings back in two thousand and six. He had blocked the execution of a man who had raped and strangled the seventeen year old girl. After Fogel's ruling, people went crazy. But crazy in two thousand and six is different from crazy now. The point is that everything is amplified and sped up, and there's just no way you can respond to that. Judges are precluded by the Code of Conduct from commenting on pending cases. These forces of it that are antagonistic to judicial authority. I've gained enormous strength, and there's not a corresponding gain in in the forces. In the strength of the forces that might defend authority. That's right. I think there are steps along the way, and that one of the most important qualities judges in America have right now is that people believe in their independence. Emily Basilon with one final thought, if that starts to break down in a really serious way, then even if they technically remain independent, wouldn't they start to feel tempted more and more to do whatever is politically expedient. But if they stop behaving in any plausible way as if they're independent, then aren't we on our way to Uzbekistan? America Obviously isn't Uzbekistan. The Uzbek judges lived in a black box. The American judge lives in a plex a glass cage. The Uzbeks had no ability to criticize their system of justice or even to see how it really worked. We watch our judges as they've never been watched before. It's not that all eyes are upon judges when they do their jobs. It's that all eyes are upon them when they do their jobs in unpopular ways. When some subset of the population feels that it's being handed a cucumber when it deserves a grape. People from the Supreme Court of Ukraine came to visit and so in this meeting with them, and they say, well, you know what happens when you rule against the government, and so nothing, you know, if the government doesn't like the ruling, they appeal, you know, but nothing happens to me, you know. And they thought I was being disrespectful, that I wasn't being truthful with them. He was being truthful. But there's more than one way to attack the independence of judges. You don't need to completely eliminate it. All you need to do is to generate sufficient mistry trust of their judgments, and then it isn't long before every judge is just a little bit frightened to do her job. The Ninth Circuit we're gonna have to look at that, because every case, no matter where it is, they file it. And what's called the Ninth Circuit. This was an Obama judge. And I'll tell you what, It's not gonna happen like this anymore. She tests her rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us and cumber again. There's one big practical difference between experimental monkeys and human beings. The monkeys at least pretend to respect their referees, the people who work with them, and the scientists really do want the best for the monkeys. The researchers piss them off by giving one a cucumber and another a grape, but they don't allow them to stay pissed off. And how long do the feelings linger? Oh, then I don't know. We usually by the end of the experiment, because these monkeys live in the group, they don't live in these test chambers. By the end of the experiment, we give them a lot of food and all very happy, and then they are sent back to the group. So we never know how long how long they're mad, because we don't want them to be frustrated by the experiment. People aren't given that chance. Our experiment is called life, and it's frustrating when we see unfairness. We aren't sent to some decompression chamber to calm down before rejoining our fellow human beings. We look around for something or someone to attack, and at some point we see the judge. I'm Michael Lewis, thanks for listening to Against the Rules. Against the Rule is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Audrey Dilling and Katherine Giredo, with research assistance from Zoe, Oliver Gray and Beth Johnson. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mia Lobell is our executive producer. Our theme was composed by Nick Brittel, with additional scoring by Seth Samuel, mastering by Jason Gambrel. Our show was recorded by Tofa Ruth at Northgate Studios in Berkeley. Special thanks to our founders, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell.

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