Steve Palmer [00:00:00]:
Steve Palmer here, Lawyer Talk Podcast here with q and a. And I've sort of, dovetailed q and a with I get to respond to comments. Why? Because it's my show, and that's what I like to do. And I love it. I absolutely love it. I love it when people comment. I love the debate. There's actually people debating about some of the debates that have already been debated, which makes no sense, but it actually is interesting to me, believe it or not.
Steve Palmer [00:00:20]:
And today, I'm gonna talk about a comment that I received from Mick, m I c, rouse b, r o u s b, four two zero six nine. And this is in response to a, I think, a short that we posted and had to do with airplanes and flying over people's property and our reasonable expectation of privacies. So before I read the comment, I'm gonna play that again here so we have it. What they're really saying behind the scenes is, do we want the police be able to fly over your house with a chopper and take pictures of what's got going on to help solve crime? And I guess the court said, yes.
Troy Hendrickson [00:00:57]:
Yeah. To to I don't know if I totally agree with it or anything. I mean but also, I guess, if I'm in a commercial airliner and I look down out the window and I look at your property, I guess there's no expectation of privacy. I don't know if I'd fly right now. There's a lot of kind of flight issues going on. But Yeah. Right.
Steve Palmer [00:01:14]:
Right now is not the time to be on the in the but, no, the the point is is that they said, no. It's too far. You don't really have a reasonable expectation of privacy for protection from public airspace because after all, the airspace is public. Yeah. Alright. So now we get to the next Alright. So what, pray tell, does Mick Ralphie have to say about this? What an absolutely stupid example. Commercial airliners fly so high up, you can so high up, you literally can't see cars or buildings.
Steve Palmer [00:01:46]:
You could be flying over a major highway that's consistently loaded with traffic, and I will literally look like it'll literally look like no one is on the road. You're right. All that is right. It is a ridiculous example, and it is, that probably is true that if you're in an airline, you can't see. I was gonna research beforehand. Maybe I'll do it real quick. How far up the U Two spy planes were. I I imagine Mick is probably too maybe too young to remember that.
Steve Palmer [00:02:10]:
But anyway, we used to have spy planes and, this almost, blew up the cold war and turned it into a hot war back, during Kennedy's reign right before, I think, the Cuban Missile Crisis. But anyway, I could be wrong in the timeline. We had very high planes flying over and taking pictures of the Soviet Union. It just an interesting historical side. But so why is this a ridiculous example? And why are you right? And why do I use ridiculous examples like that or lawyers use ridiculous examples like that? Because what we try to do or what I try to do and what good lawyers, I think, try to do is apply a rule to its logical extreme. Because if you can apply the rule all the way to its logical extreme, and then extract from that either exceptions, or maybe you disprove the rule altogether, then you can come up with rules that become unassailable. This is this is basically logic, you know, and anybody who's gone and read read the Plato dialogues with Socrates, that's what Socrates that's what they do. They discuss these things back and forth, and they try to apply, a theory to its extreme.
Steve Palmer [00:03:15]:
It's not unlike the scientific method in a lot of ways. Now with law, it adds some nuance to it, and it gets a little bit more abstract because we like to make exceptions. And then we we try to hone in the hard fast, ridges of the rule as much as we can, and then we sort of round it over and say, well, where where is the play in the joints? And in this case, the play in the joints is, alright, we can be so high up in a commercial airliner that you can't see. But what if in about ten or fifteen years, you can? What if we have what if we have an advance in cameras or the ability to spy? It may already exist. Maybe in in The U Two times, maybe it did exist. But so how are we gonna apply it in the future, if we can foresee technology that that would apply or that that that planes will have, with cameras that can see down. We still have to have a rule, and we're trying to craft a rule and craft reasoning that will transcend the current fact pattern, that the courts are looking at. This again, if you wanna geek out with me for a while, this is the common law.
Steve Palmer [00:04:19]:
You know, it's it's it's like this competing, two competing interests. One to have finality in the law and rules you can apply, and another that lets the law evolve with technology, with our culture, with, you know, how we how humans evolve. So on the one hand, it has to be rigid. On the other hand, it has to move, and then they clash in the middle. As courts evaluate different fact patterns, they get to adjust the rule to fit the fact pattern without, hopefully, without completely reversing the rule. Now there have been some reversals. We experienced one on Roe v Wade just recently because, again, if if you look at the I think the court looked at a situation back in Roe v Wade. They created a hard fast rule and it turned out that people disagreed with it later, people disagree with it now, whatever it is, but now it gets reversed.
Steve Palmer [00:05:06]:
I'm not taking a stance on abortion. But my my point is is that the law has to be able to evolve. We have to craft rules that apply across the board yet are flexible enough that they can apply to unforeseen scenarios. So that's why we use these flexible enough that they can apply to unforeseen scenarios. So that's why we use these ridiculous examples. So both thing can be both things are true at once. It is a ridiculous example because we all know that if you're, you know, however many feet high in the jet stream flying back from California, you can't look down in somebody's yard and see what's going on. But what if you could? That's the point.
Steve Palmer [00:05:32]:
Alright. So that is lawyer talk, q and a, or comment style, off the record on the air, at least until now.