 Hello, everyone. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to another exciting episode of Generally Irritable with Erica Reddick. This episode is actually pretty exciting. I am really, really pleased to have on today, attorney John Franco. John, why don't you... Should I introduce you? Do you want to introduce yourself? I should have planned this before we got started. I have known John... Here, I'll start. I've known John for more than a decade. We know each other because I used to work for an accounting firm in the same building as him and he used our printer copier fax machine, right? That was the deal you guys had. Still do. And the pencil sharpener and the what the what the what do you call it the the spring water that they have there? Oh, excellent. Okay, so you've got so you have a deal... And so we were reacquainted when I moved back to Vermont in 2018 and started having problems with the city regarding our house and the zoning issues and all this stuff. So I've talked about this a little bit on the show and I just knew the only thing I knew about John was that he fought for the little people. Like that's what I knew about John. His his charge as an attorney was to fight for the little people. So he's walking through one day as we're dealing with all this nonsense with the city and I'm super mad and I go, hey John, you fight for the little guy, right? And you said and you said, uh, well, that depends on who the little guy is or something like that. And so we've been really excited to have you on on our team to help with that suit with the city. Because you have so much historical knowledge about the city and about Vermont. And I love when I ask you questions, I get to see all the like gears spinning in your head and you're just like, oh, well, there was this case in this case in this case and the disposition was this and this and this. And I said, who better to share with Vermonters than John Franco to talk about qualified immunity? And I think we're going to get into a little bit about just immunity in general because John, I did not know there was sovereign immunity, absolute immunity qualified. I didn't know there was like variations. So you're going to have to explain some of that. Um, but we're not just talking about, you know, there's been a lot of talk lately about qualified immunity for police officers, but that same immunity or similar immunity applies to your elected officials and municipalities as well. So they can do stuff and not be held liable, right? Unless they're committing a crime, basically. Like they have to do something actually. The liability being sued civilly. Okay. Nobody is immune from criminal prosecution. Right, exactly. So John Franco, attorney at law, why don't you give people, you know, a couple minutes to talk about, give them a couple minutes of, you know, who you are, how you got here and why you're so passionate about helping people. Um, because you really are. I mean, I can tell how passionate you are about the law and helping people. So what drives that passion for you? Well, I decided definitely to go to law school after working a year in a paint store after I got out of college and I came to the conclusion that the paint store wasn't my, uh, wasn't my calling. And my father was also an auto dealer and my mother used to say, you're not going to the car business like your father. And I said to my mother, you don't need to worry about that. Our business, um, you know, I've been doing this for 43 years. I started practicing in 1978. Um, I'm at the different end of the political spectrum than you are, but I consider myself. I'm on the left, but I consider myself libertarian. Um, a lot of the stuff that's going on currently in politics, particularly from the left, I really have deeper problems with, but that's a different discussion. As this relates to sovereign immunity, this relates to people having recourse against the government that's supposed to represent them when the government screws them over for the interest them or government officials in to enter them, or the government officials act arbitrarily and capriciously, or they do it for retaliatory reasons. Um, and that's where the whole idea of immunity comes in. When I, you know, when I was growing up, we were taught that what, you know, this was in the middle of the Cold War and we were taught one of the things that distinguished the United States from say the Eastern bloc or other countries is that people in this country had the right to sue their government. Um, that is sort of true, but not necessarily true. And in fact, the overriding doctrine that says that you can't sue the government is called sovereign immunity. And that still is the kind of the foundational position of the law that what sovereign immunity says is that you can't sue the government unless the government says you can sue them. So then what becomes is how kind of them, how kind of them. And it's really just, if you read the Vermont Constitution, which says that, you know, the government is just the expression of the people and then it says right in the Vermont Constitution, it's the people who are sovereign, not the government. It puts a little twist on the idea, well, the government has sovereign immunity in that the people can't sue the government unless the government says they can be sued. So it's like in your case, in a lot of cases where people get, people get harmed or hurt or screwed over by the government, and they want to have recourse. And in too many times, as we've seen quite recently with police misconduct issues, they don't have recourse and they don't have adequate recourse. It was very difficult to be successful in getting it. And the hoops and the hurdles that are thrown up for people to try to get recourse against the government is so hard. It's such a deterrent for them to do it that most people give up and the system is designed to do that. So there's all kinds of, there's a whole menu of immunities that we can go through. You might want to hand out some no-dos to your viewers here before we get into all the metaphysics of it. But I'll go through the metaphysics and maybe you kind of deal with the indignation and the politics of it. Well, let me, let me, that sounds great. Let me ask you a question to start with, right? So, so explain again, because you, I think you said it, but I want you to explain again what the foundational idea is for immunity. Is it that, so I heard you say, you know, the government is the expression of the people. And so therefore you'd be like suing the state, like your neighbors. Is it, is it that, you know, people can't possibly foresee the terrible things that are going to happen from the stupid policies that they enact. Like, what is the foundational idea for all of these kinds of immunities so that we can just kind of have that in the back of our mind as you're talking about this stuff. My point was that the basic idea of sovereign immunity as it's expressed in the law is a complete contradiction to what the Vermont Constitution says. Because it says it is the people who are sovereign and the government is just the representatives and the expression of the people. And so it's therefore to say that the people can't sue the government is supposed to be the representatives. It's a total contradiction. Now the idea of sovereign immunity comes directly from, keep in mind, we are in, for those of you who didn't go to law school, we are in what's called an Anglo-American common law legal system. We have it Canada except for Quebec, Quebec has a Napoleonic system. The rest of America is on the Spanish system, which is a continental system. So we have an English common law system. The idea of sovereign immunity comes directly from British law, which says you can't sue the sovereign, which is the king or the queen. That's where that idea comes from. You know, if you even turn your back to them, you've got to leave the room, you've got to back out, you've got a curtsy, you've got to do all this crap. And that's where the basic idea comes from out of English common law. Interesting. I'm going to get grafted on to American law without the recognition of the contradiction of what that means, because under U.S. law, under U.S. constitutional law, and in Vermont constitutional law, the people are the people. The Vermont Constitution says the people are the sovereign, not the government. That's that contradiction. So I'm just hearing you say that, and I'm thinking about how kind of anti-government the founding fathers were, right? Like, the founding fathers were pretty anti-government because they knew that it could suck, right? So they said, we're going to try to make it the best possible type of government that we can, you know, taking the best of all these other systems. It surprises me that they let that creep in, given how many checks and balances they had and how the president wasn't supposed to be king and all that stuff. Well, you know, I mean, it's the ideology is fighting the revolution. But then when the revolution's over, political parties are empowered and want to hold under the power of privilege, then you start getting the erosion of that. And you start getting the interjection of old ideas from British common law into the American judicial, and what's called American jurisprudence. Okay, I would say that's probably the root of it. But the basic idea was the basic idea of sovereign immunity is the government is supreme, and therefore the government can't be sued in its own courts. How can you do that? How can you sue the queen? She's the sovereign, you know. Who's going to hold her accountable? She's accountable only to herself. That's the idea. I mean, it's crazy. And you say about the founding fathers. I mean, look at the world they were operating in, in most of Europe, at least, you know, you had monarchies that where there was a fusion of monarchies and you had a state religion. And so you said that the idea of the government sucked is an understate. I mean, it's entirely different here. And the idea of government that we have in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was right out of John Locke, who was a British philosopher in the 18th century. I mean, that's that's where that really that basically came from. But it was the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation. It was all that all that it's that started. And then I got, I don't know when Martin Luther, you know, attacks his theses to the door of the church. But I forgot what century it was in, but it was after the printing press. Yeah, when we got to when we actually got to read the Bible for ourselves, I tell people that all the time. I'm like, you hear a lot of things. Never let anybody read your Bible for you. Pick it up. Read it. That is amazing. Okay. So that's so those are some of the kind of foundational questions. By the way, that's a goodness working with who rely too much on social media, too. Go to go to the original source, please. Poor for war. That's what one of my favorite gifts. Oh, no, I left it at the house. One of my favorite gifts that Benjamin, my husband has gotten for me is the Federalist Papers. It's the complete work of the Federalist Papers. I'm just like, this is amazing. I mean, it's really hard to read and you have to like, you have to have a dictionary right next to you and like an old dictionary that has real words in it, not dictionary.com. Second best gift I've been given was from my friend, Greg, and it's a 1940s dictionary. It's awesome. Okay. So my concern and I think a lot of people's concern, especially as we see the government really stretching its powers right now here in Vermont with the charter changes that were approved in Burlington and then you've got the climate stuff where they don't care that they're bankrupting people and shutting businesses down and things like that. So there's a lot of us that feel like it. I'm not saying you feel this way. So these are my words. A lot of us feel like the government is just, it's got its hand too much in our lives. It's got our hand too much in our pocketbooks and our businesses and our homes and raising our kids and stuff like that. So how as a concerned citizen, do I know where the government boundary is supposed to be? How do I fight back when they're doing stuff that is invariably going to create harm? You've just talked about political questions, which is very different than sovereign immunity. Sovereign immunity is what do you do when there's a woman who's in a house on Stanford Road in Burlington, who's a fourth generation of her family that's lived in this house. It was built before the Beatles run at Sullivan. I love that phrase. And it never got a permit for it. At least we don't know that they ever got a permit for it. And now 60 years later, the city of Burlington comes along and says, we're going to shut you down because you don't have the zoning permit. Correct. I mean, that is a major harm. You could fight that, fortunately. But if you win and you turn out to be correct, you don't have any recourse against the city for having you forcing you to spend the amount of money that you've had to spend in order to maintain the use of a property that's been in the same use since January 19th. Exactly. So basically, our choices are short sell it at a loss for somebody who will pay cash for it because the volume of work that would have to be done to please the city is just too much. We don't know. So it's either that or spend tons of money on legal fees in the hopes and prayers that the court rules in favor of what the actual law says. Right. And so that seems like crappy. Why can't you sue the zoning administrator for having a very, for overreaching in his interpretation of the statute? Or for the judge who's overreached in the interpretation of the statute and has adopted a construction and actually contradicts with the intention of the legislature is what's your recourse for that? Other than challenging that and hopefully you win in court in order to get your money back, the answer is no. You don't have any recourse and the answer for that is sovereign immunity. Sovereign immunity. And the reason for that, the reason you can't go after the zoning administrator is because under Vermont law for municipalities, if it's a governmental function, the governmental function has sovereign immunity. You cannot sue them for it. The reason you can't go, you can't sue the judge is because there's a absolute immunity for judges, legislators and high executive officials in the government. It's an absolute immunity. You can't sue them. You cannot sue them. Even if they're making decisions that are contrary to law and precedent. Especially when they make decisions that are contrary to law and precedent. Yep. Especially. How? How is this allowed? How? I'll tell you why it's allowed. Okay. First of all, let me walk the viewers through some wonderful, the best, what I call the best hits of sovereign immunity under Vermont law and then a little later in the program I talked about that's going on federally with qualified immunity. One of my favorites, this is an oldie but goodie. This decided in 1977, I think the, oh God, I'm blanking out here. I'll get it in a moment. It was my second year of law school. It's called, it's a case called Dugan versus city of Burlington. Mr. Dugan stepped in either a great, a sewer great or fell into a manhole or something in Burlington. It was just through the city of Burlington. And the city of Burlington claimed sovereign immunity. And so the question, this is one to talk about the earth shattering questions that appear before the Vermont Supreme Court. The question in resolving this was whether or not the catch basin was connected to the sewer system, which would make it not subject to sovereign immunity because the sewer system is considered part of the proprietary function of the city of Burlington, meaning the water and wastewater system that was considered proprietary or whether it was part of the street drainage system for the street and the street is governmental and that would have been governmental. And he couldn't sue the city if the great was attached to the street. So the question was, did the great serve the sewer system? Did the great serve the street drainage system? As it turned out, it served both. So wait, what is it? I honestly know how they actually resolved that, but so wait. So this is kind of a crazy ass distinction that you get about whether or not something's immune or not. That's what I'm saying. Like, aren't they both city departments? Consider proprietary. This is they're both city departments. The police department is governmental. The fire department is governmental. The zoning administrator is governmental. But Burlington Electric is proprietary. Probably the airport is proprietary. The water and wastewater system is proprietary. What? How? Probably, I'm sure the city recycling pickup system is considered proprietary. Are they like? These are the crimes that are just really crazy ass distinctions. In fact, in this, I think it was in this Hudson case, the lawyers in that case said, why don't you get rid of this? This is nuts and the court wouldn't do it. That's what I'm saying. So why is one of those a government agency and one is not when they're both all government agencies? Like, how do you? What is the water? The next idea is that you don't charge. It's like a private water system. You don't pay it. You don't use taxes to pay for it. It's paid through for a fee. You get a water bill every month, and it's based on how much water you consume. That's the difference. That's the basic idea. It doesn't matter who loans it. It's whether or how is it. Okay. So that's what you said. The real problem is most city departments have a combination of taxes and user fees. So I mean, it's just, it is to use a Yiddish word. It is Meshugana. It makes no sense. It's crazy. But they, and they were, the Supreme Court was invited to abandon it. Now I can get it, I will get into in a minute what the state or the rule for state government is on sovereign immunity because it's different. So wait. Okay, wait, wait, wait. Okay, wait. You just said, shoot, what did you just say? I was good. Crap. There was so much there. So, well, you said the state was invited to restate it. The Supreme Court was invited to, keep in mind, these are all judicially, these are all rules that have been adopted by the courts and their decisions. In other words, that's what the common law, we have a common law system and the courts and the court decisions have drawn this distinction between proprietary and governmental. And then one of these cases that might have been the Hudson case, it might have been another one. The Supreme Court was invited to scrap this. They said it doesn't work. It's stupid. They refused to do it. So, okay, wait. Okay, so wait. The argument was, remember the old thing, remember the old life serial ad with Mikey and had Mikey try it to see if Mikey liked it. The Supreme Court had the Mikey excuse. They said, well, you know, the legislature could change this that they wanted to and they never have, so we're not going to. That was the, that was the reasoning they used. So, okay. So it's not actually written into the law that there is a difference between, I'm sorry, proprietary and governmental. So the law doesn't say there's a difference, but some court decided at some point, that's for whatever reason, there was a difference. And therefore, Ergo, henceforth, we've decided that they are different somehow. But any rational person looking at that is like, no, it's not. It's the same thing. Well, let me give you a tip on crazy asses, okay? Okay, okay. Hudson versus Eastwood Pillar. Well, if you can't sue the municipality, can you sue the person that worked for the municipality? And that's where official immunity comes in. Okay, and this is, this gets just really bizarre. And I, I don't understand it. I've been practicing law for 43 years. I don't think anybody else will. As I said, there's absolute immunity. If you're a high mucky muck, you're absolutely immune. If you're an attorney general or judge, you're a legislature, you can't be sued. This qualified immunity for office holders that perform ministerial acts, but not acts of, of, of, of, uh, discretionary, who don't perform discretionary duties. And then there's a different standard for a lower level government employees who perform discretionary duties. So the question is whether or not the duty is ministerial or discretionary. If you think I have any ghostly notes about idea, what the hell that means? I do know. What's ministerial? I don't even know what the hell that means. We usually come up with the result we like and then we plug in the rationale for it. But anyway, Hudson versus East Montpelier involves a lawsuit. I don't know what the guy was a snow plow driver for East Montpelier. Okay. And I don't know if his plow knocked down mailboxes or knocked down fences or knocked down the walls or something, but somebody got, Hudson got ticked off and sued, um, and tried to sue the, the, the driver for it. And so then the question was, well, the town of East Montpelier can't be sued for the snow plow driver knocking down the mailboxes. How can the, the driver of the truck be sued for it? Um, and, um, the, strange as it may seem, the Supreme Court said, yes, you can sue and collect from the, from the snow plow truck driver because, um, the act of driving a snow plow does not involve any official discretion or, uh, policy. And they're, and then what they said is the whole reason for this having immunity is that we don't want to number one, we don't want to hamper public officials from vigorously discharging their duties in a prompt and decisive manner. In other words, we don't want, we don't want lawsuits so that public officials are looking over their shoulders, worrying about getting sued and pull their punches about how they administer the law. And number two, um, we don't want to subject, um, how government policy is implemented by second guessing by the judiciary because that violates separation of powers. Those are, uh, those are administrative and legislative decisions, not judicial decisions. And we're not going to second guess that. So having said, wait a minute, the Supreme Court said, driving a snow plow truck, driving a snow plow truck doesn't involve any of those things. And therefore the poor guy isn't immune and he gets sued. So that was the logic of Hudson versus Eastwood. Yeah. I mean, he's just, you know, he's just the guy, he's just the hourly worker driving in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, not home with his family if there's a snowstorm. This is the stuff when you explain it to me, John. Oh, I'm getting a weird echo. When you explain it to me, it just makes my head hurt because like none of that, first of all, you can't even say that it's, uh, you know, an intrusion on the separation of powers because it's not even the legislature who made up the rule in the first place. It was the court. And then so, so the court would be the one actually who would have to rule differently in order to change the precedent moving forward. Are they declined to do it? They declined to do it. I think this is so fascinating. Okay. So well, as they say on the infomercial, there's more. Oh, so you have this. Okay. This is what it is a municipal law. You have the state of sovereign immunity. I mean, there's governmental immunity. There's not immunity for proprietary functions. And then if you get on the food changes suing the actual individuals, we did the thing. There would be official immunity like the zoning administrator. You probably would be able to get away with suing the zoning administrator because he's a municipal officer and you would not be able to sue them for his discretionary execution of his duties. For exactly the reason I talked to, they don't want to have, they don't want to have people that enforce the law or set policy having to be worried about looking over their shoulder. They want to have their duties done in the prompt and decisive manner. And also they don't think the judiciary should be second guessing how the zoning administrator performs his functions, even though the zoning administrator is an quasi-judicial rule. But that's another question. So this is the, this is the morass of immunity in under permissible. And then when you get the state, the state immunity rules make a little bit more sense than this. Okay. Okay. State immunity rules aren't so crazy. What the state immunity rule says, that we have something called the tort claims act. What the state immunity rule says, again, there's the act of the state is waive sovereign immunity. And they said these, this is either these circumstances, we waive sovereign immunity. And the basic rule is that the state waives sovereign immunity for negligent or wrongful, let me get the word here, for negligent or wrongful acts of employees acting within their scope of their duties. If they're acting under circumstances in a manner and extent, as a private person would be liable, this is called, excuse me, this is called the so-called private analog. If there is an, if there's an analog to what somebody would do privately, the state is doing something that's analogous to what somebody would do privately, then the state is liable for the wrongful discharging that responsibility, just as a private person would, would be. What's an example of that? Oh, let me give you two of them. The most, maybe the most famous formulation of that was in 1995 was a case called Sabia versus State. Sabia was a suit brought by awards of the state that were put in foster care, and they were sexually abused by the foster parents, and the state was completely negligent in the supervision of the, of the home. And that was a heavily contested case. And it was one of the rare cases where the Supreme Court said, you know, and I think it was because of the facts of the case, why they allowed it. They said, this has a private analog to supervision of, of, of people in a home. It's a negligent supervision case, and we're going to allow it. They allowed the law student that case. So what would be, is that like parenting is the analog? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the argument on the other side was there wasn't really an analog to state supervision of foster homes, but the Supreme Court came up with one and allowed that suit to go forward. A current here is from, here's actually litigated that case. That was 25 years ago, but that was a very big landmark case in Vermont regarding the story of state tort claims. Let me give you two other ones. Another one called Kenny versus State. This was decided in 2011. This was a case where the mother of an elderly woman had called the police, state police, and asked them to do what's called a welfare check on their mother. A welfare check is to have somebody come in and check whether or not that person is okay, because I think the mother was, was getting, well, was getting seen on. And what happened was the state tubers went to the wrong address. They didn't find anything wrong. And so they didn't report anything. Well, the reason they went to the wrong address was the address on the house was an even numbered address. And so the, the address was on the mailbox on the side of the road with this, with the head number is 392. So they went into 392. What they thought was 392, but it wasn't 392. The mailbox of 392 is on the other side of the road. 392 is the other side. Wow. I hope I don't own nuts. Did I just lose you? No, no, I'm just focusing on you. When you're talking about good stuff. I just got to pop up. I'm sorry. Well, anyway, the short of it is the officer screwed up with the wrong house. The woman was outside in her backyard and had fallen down and couldn't get up and suffered. This was in the winter and suffered from hypothermia. She didn't die immediately, but after about a week, she died of hypothermia. And so the state was sued and the court said a welfare check has a private analog and therefore the state was liable for them. Okay. What's the private analog of that? That people do check up on other people. People are asked to check up on other people. And if they accept that responsibility, they do it negligently, then they're liable for the negligent discharge of the... That's the general... Florence was never my strong suit in law school, but that's the basic theory. That's interesting. Now, another case where they didn't allow it was a case I was involved in. It was a case called... Edson versus Barry Supervisory Union was decided in 2007. That was actually a lawsuit against Barry Spaulding High School. Flirucci, who was a sophomore at Spaulding, and she was lured out of school. The ender had been having problems. She'd been having school problems. She'd been having behavioral problems. A lot of it had to do with her family situation with her mother or mother and her mother's first husband were not the best. Her mother remarried in her... Her new stepfather and her mother were much more attentive to her needs and put her on a pretty strict regimented schedule about her. She was going to school. She had to go to school. She had to go through her classes. She had to go back. I think she had to walk back to where her new... Her stepfather work was within one of the granite shifts just across the street. Had to report to him and so forth and so on. While there was this guy who was this very sick person, mass murderer named Dana Martin in Barry, who sent somebody down to the law school, to the high school, to lure her out of class and to go to party at his house up on off of Camp Street in Barry. She was lured... Not only was she lured out of the school by this... Not by Dana Martin, by the guy, but by the guy she sent down. The principal of the school ran into this guy in the hallway three times. I mean, this is right out of the Bible, you know. Wow. Three times before the cock crowed. Three times, didn't escort him off the premises. Knew the guy didn't have any business being there. Actually told the guy to leave. This guy lured her out of class and it was her last two modules. She wasn't there. Up to this place, it was on Dunmont Avenue in Barry where this young girl was beaten, sexually assaulted, driven up to the rural area of Orange Robot and thrown off a bridge in a way stream to die. Thrown off the bridge naked into the stream to die. Wow. And so we tried to bring a negligence suit against the spawning for, you know, you had this guy running around the school. And I think they had an idea that they knew that he was looking for her as well. And the court wouldn't allow us to sue the high school for it. Why is that not... I mean, the official reason they gave, which didn't make any sense, they said, well, it wasn't foreseeable that something like this could happen. Every parent of a teenager, that's their worst nightmare, of course it's foreseeable. I actually made the worst nightmare argument. I said, you've got to be kidding me. What? A parent doesn't worry that of an older man lures a 14-year-old girl out of high school, there might be sex involved? Really? That's not foreseeable? Well, and that's if the person who screwed up the welfare check, if that's considered something that's done by a... There's an analogous to a private citizen. Then how is it like not the same thing if you're the principal and you see a grown man that doesn't belong there, why wouldn't there be anything analogous to that? Three times, not one screw up with a welfare check. Three times they had an opportunity to do this. And it was against... And they had a whole policy about people that aren't students or faculty members being in... Keep in mind, this was after 9-11. So the old days when I went to high school, you could go out by the river and smoke pot and then go back to class. Those days were over. Everything was shut down. And you had to go through and you had to go through and you had to report in the front and so forth and so on. So this guy's roaming around... You know, the door's locked. And this guy's roaming around the high school and they didn't escort him to the door, to a locked door so he couldn't come in. Here's the real reason they didn't do it. They didn't want the taxpayers of the city of Barry to have to pay for the criminal acts of this psychopath. That's what it was about. It was because it was criminal conduct. That is... Excuse me. But isn't that... So this is the thing that... Excuse me. I really just got something in my throat there. It seems like to me there's not even an equal application of the law. It's like what judge you get matters, it sounds like. I get the argument that you don't want to make taxpayers liable for something that they didn't do, right? Because ultimately if you're suing the city, I'm suing my neighbors, they're going to pay for it if I've been harmed somehow. But so they're not applying the law equally, it depends on what judge you get, whether or not they're actually going to go by what the rules or the precedent says. And then still there's no liability or accountability for the people that we put in charge. Well, there's not, I won't say there's never because clearly in the case of the people at that time was called SRS, who were charged with supervising these foster kids in the Saudi and also the state troopers that had, you know, it was an innocent mistake, it was the mailboxes on the opposite side of the road. And it was understandable, but they allowed them to recover. And you allow recovery there and you have an egregious case with the principal of the high school has, you know, running around the halls of the high school, working off the premises. You know, and they say, well, no, that's not, you know, there's not culpable negligence on the part of the school district, because the rationale they use is that the harm that be felt or wasn't foreseeable, of course it's foreseeable, is what every parent's worth nightmare is. Well, what is foreseeable? You've got to be kidding me, it's not foreseeable. And that's one of those words that people can manipulate and just decide what they think is reasonable or not. It is exactly what you thought. They come up with the result they wanted and then they come up with the rationale to fit it. So the foreseeability was what they hung their hat on. They came up with the decision that we're not going to have the taxpayers of Barry pay for what Dana Martin did to this girl. And so then the rationale they use is while they use foreseeability, even though, even though the school administrators were clearly negligent, I would say they are arguably grossly negligent. Well, and then, so then where do we as citizens, how can we even feel safe about, you know, if something happens to us or if, you know, we're harmed in some way. You know, there, you, you mentioned something about earlier, before we went live, about knowing the rules of the game. And, and that the agreement is that, you know, there is a defined set of rules and everybody knows what the rules are ahead of time. And that's how you can have a free society. I think that was how you set it. Well, it was the idea of the Enlightenment was that the whole idea of the rule of law is that we cannot have a functioning economy if people don't know, they can't engage in commerce with people, don't know what the rules of the game are ahead of time. So that when they enter into commercial transactions, so they do things, they know what the consequences are going to be. And they wouldn't know what the rules are, they know what their responsibilities are, they know what the responsibilities of the other person are. That's very different than say systems where you have like a kleptocracy in Russia, where everybody's everybody's on the tape, there's corruption all over the place. Nobody really knows what the rules of the game are. It's what you know and who you can pay off. And the whole idea of the rule of law is that the ladder of the Russian situation, or the situation that you had prior to the the Enlightenment and the Reformation, is not conducive to a modern functioning economy, modern functioning society. The problem with all these exceptions and all these inconsistencies is that the more complex things, that's one of the problems with our society, with the law, the more complex things become, the less certainly in confidence people have in what they do and what the law is going to bring. And that really has, I think, a very corrosive effect. I think that's a big reason why people don't trust government now. You're having a bigger and bigger problem with people trusting government. And they just don't know, I always say, and I'll talk about this, when I first started practicing, when you read decisions in the remote Supreme Court, and this was like in the 1970s, they were very simple but elegant decisions that would lay out a basic principle of law that you could then take to the bank. There weren't a lot of parsing or distinctions for it. There were basic rules. And I think that was a function of the fact that in that era, the remote Supreme Court knew that Vermont was primarily an agricultural state, an agricultural society. People didn't have a lot of spare cash to hire lawyers to fight about nuances of things. And that the court understood that people in the state needed to have a basic statement about the rules of the game where so they can go out and then act accordingly. And boy, in my 40-some-odd years of practicing law, man, have we gotten away from that. I mean, I had a lot of old decisions in the remote Supreme Court in the 40s and 50s and 60s and early 70s. I mean, you could get, they're just simple statements of what the rule was, and they say, okay, this is the rule. And they wouldn't, you could go to court and they wouldn't try to parse it away. They wouldn't try to distinguish it. They wouldn't ignore the previous decision. Back into the decision by making up a bunch of nonsense that sounds like it was a rule. Result-oriented, by the way, that approach is called being result-oriented. Right. And that, to me, that is one of the most egregious examples of overreach or stomping on separation of powers. The judiciary's job is to determine whether something is lawful or not, not to write legislation or write policy. Not in a common law jurisdiction. That's not true. I hear every time there's a conservative judge who's up for a point and he says, all we do is call walls and strikes. That is total polyunsaturated horseshit. We are in a common law jurisdiction. The major part of the law in this country is called, is by case law. It's by judicial interpretation. Okay. If you want this kind of system where the judges don't make the law, then you have a continental system like France or Italy or Spain. But we have a common law system that judges, in fact, do write the law and do make the law up. They do not call walls and strikes. They write through what the rules of the game are. Well, then what's the point of having- They have to be from the picture's map. That's because somebody decided 200 years ago that's what the deal is. Then how come- No, that doesn't make any sense. Okay. If that is the case, then why is there separation of powers at all? Why don't we just have judges so they can write the law and decide whatever they feel like today if it's precedent or not? And then, I mean, that's basically what they're doing anyway. Well, the fallback argument though is that if the legislature wants to change these decisions, what are called the common law decisions that the judges make, they're always free to do it. They can overrule it. That's happened. That's happened in a number of cases in Vermont. There was a case, a famous case several years ago called the Brigh-Bianchi decision that said that if you didn't have proper permits for your property, it was actually affected during your land title. And that decision was made by the Supreme Court over a strung dissent by the then Chief Justice of the state. And he said, this is just going to be a disaster. It turned out to be a disaster. And it took several acts to the legislature to correct the mayhem that that particular decision created by the general... So why can't we sue those judges for that? You know, what happens in the United States is that legislation gets passed. And more often, and not then through judicial decision, it's death by a thousand cuts. They can strew it into oblivion. They can strew it so it's impossible to work with or it's so expensive to try to get any recourse that nobody's going to bother. That happened with the antitrust laws. It's happened with the civil rights laws. I mean, I could go on and on. It's happened with the anti-discrimination laws. It's happened with the Equal Pay Act. I mean, that's what happens. That's what happens. Oh my God, John, this is the stuff that just made it like... Okay, so what is a normal... What could we do? Let's say... Let's just say... I'm just throwing this out there. We get a bunch of liberty-minded people elected to office. And they say, you know what? Enough of all this nonsense. The common law precedent... I'm going to use the wrong words. So correct me. That's the common law system. The common law system. The precedents that have been set by the judiciary. This is all nonsense. It's too complicated. Screw you. We want to just get rid of all of this stuff. Like, is that feasible? What would we have to do as Vermonters to fix... Okay, so it's a two-part question. What would we have to do to fix the cluster that is the law here? The voluminous layers of compliance and zoning and all of this, right? So can it be fixed? Can it be simplified? And how? If you think it could be a common law system that this state is based on... The phrase about turning an aircraft carrier... No. It's too baked in. It's just too baked in. What you've got to do is... And I think really... I think a lot of this is really the fault of the judges and the political culture in the court system. That there needs to be a culture of more simplicity in the decision-making that we used to have. Let me give you an example where you're seeing this now. Law schools are really struggling now because law students have come to the conclusion that it's just not worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that students have to go into in order to get a legal education now. And then when they get out, there really aren't the jobs there that they're either going to be able to make a living or say nothing about paying off that student loan. And then also the big law firm system is so top-heavy and so expensive now. That's starting to implode. But that's all driven by the complexity. It's the old joke about the one lawyer and Pat who starved the two who made a fortune. The more lawyers you have, the more the complexity feeds on the complexity. I mean it's all part of game theory because we're always trying to get ahead of the next person. So if somebody comes up with this clever distinction about how this case is different than the other case, then the complexity just grows exponentially. And now that's really having, I think, a crushing effect on the legal system. The law firms are contracting and then you throw COVID on top of it. The number of law firms in Vermont are contracting pretty significantly now. They're coming to realize that they really can't afford the overhead that it takes to run law firms. People, I mean, Erica, you know this better than anybody expense of even having to litigate a simple case in the courts. It's prohibitive for most people. It's prohibitive. I can't afford that. Like your case, screw it. I'm just going to have to leave the second apartment empty and we'll make whatever changes we can. That's what we're going to have to do. That's the reality. But I get a lot of landlords probably going to have to face with that and not fighting this stuff. They just don't feel it's worth it for them to do it. Yeah. Well, and then it's people are confused about why things cost so much here and why there are so many problems and housing and whatever. And that's one of the other things. So I might add in one of my crazy hair brained theories into this part of the conversation. So take a city like Burlington where we have a major housing shortage. We have a major, major housing shortage brought on primarily by the ineffectiveness or the unprofitability of building housing here. Right. So when you've got- I don't accept that at all. What? I don't accept that at all. You don't think so? We've added, look it. We've added a shitload of housing units to the housing stock in the city of Burlington. The problem has been that in the last 30 or 40 years, the size of the average household unit has consistently shrunk. So what's happened is we've had pretty much the same population that we've had for 40 years, about 40,000. But because of that, because of the household size is shrunk, we've needed more and more units to house them. Oh. The number two problem is the University of Vermont continues to has for 50 years housed only about half of its student population and it's thrown the other half on to the housing, rental housing market in the city. Yeah. In the U of M was it was that way when I went to school and it is now. But why not? What that means there's a shortage of housing. That's out of the second two. But that means that there's a shortage of housing as the student population grows that's not calculated into that. Resident. Total. Absolutely. Well, how is that not a housing shortage? Well, but I'm saying that's a reason for it. You're saying so you don't think that you don't think that there's any thing where people don't want to build here because of the expense with all the Act 250 regulations. Oh, I think there's some of that. But I don't think that's the final reason. Not at all. Interesting. It's the presence of U of M. I think that definitely doesn't doesn't help. So then OK, so then OK, my question still remains the same, I guess. So how we have a shortage of housing. It causes prices to increase, right? Basic economics supply and demand. And the I believe the city has the power to actually do something about that and they don't. Such as. So as an example, the city of Burlington does not have like we don't have to be forced or maybe the state. We shouldn't maybe we shouldn't have to rent to college kids. What if it's not they have to is want to. You've got you've got a lot of college kids that are from from families that are from as we say your down country that are very affluent or they'll pay pay top dollar for frankly some housing stock that isn't the best in the world. And look what's happened to the housing market everywhere in the last year as a result of COVID. I mean, you've got people buying up properties like crazy. I mean, the stories out of control. It's out of control. I'm this guy that's my actually my physical therapist. He's about the same age as my stepson and he is a girlfriend or shopping for houses and they said, you know, there's an asking price in somebody comes along and pays $50,000 over asking price. No conditions, no financing cash on the barrel head, side unseen and they didn't even do a housing inspection. And there's one of the reasons for that is that a lot of there's a lot of people that actually made a lot of money in the pandemic and they're looking for a place to invest their money and they're investing it in housing that's going on all over the country. Well, not kind of thing has been going on. Praise everybody had a hissy fit. Oh, yeah. Well, that kind of stuff has been going on in Vermont for many years. I remember kids that I went to college with, you know, 20 plus years ago, whose parents, instead of just paying their rent, bought an apartment building for their kid to live in. And so you've got a bunch of people who have a vested interest in the cost of the property values continuing to ratchet up and those same a lot of those same people are in charge in their elected officials. They're in positions of power and influence. They hook up their buddies during in zoning and compliance. You know, they do favors for the people that they're friends with. You know, I mean, I'm not a big fan of I'm not a big fan of the way zoning. I've never been really a big fan of zoning because I've always felt that at the end. I like I like hear the rules when you go by my experience with zoning in with Act 250 was if they liked your project, they would bend the rules to make sure it happened. If they didn't like the project, they would bend the rules to make sure the project never happened. And so it's totally stinky. Unshare off. And so this is this is the kind of stuff that with the rules of the game. It's the people that we have in charge the elected officials and then the people that they appoint and hire to facilitate said rules break the rules. And so the how is it what can we do to either is it possible to get rid of sovereign immunity or official immunity or any of these immunities so that these bad actors bad actors can't continue to parse out the rules as they see fit. The problem with that is what I just said about the fliruji case at the end of the day. I mean, first of all, you're going to have the remote league of cities and towns and all the police association and all these people coming in saying, oh, you can't eliminate immunity because it's going to cost the taxpayers more money. We're going to have to spend more in insurance. We're going to have to spend more money in lawyers. Wouldn't people be a lot more thoughtful about who they elect? Should the taxpayers have to pay because some official threw it up. That's the basic argument. That's the basic argument. Won't people then won't people then take responsibility for who they're electing and actually pay attention because here's the problem is most people don't know the thing about bureaucracies is they basically function in the anonymity. Do you have any idea what's going on with the amendments to the code of federal regulations right now? No. Nor should you if you have any kind of meaningful life because if you do, you should be going off to an institution someplace. And what all the little vagaries of the interpretive rules, whatever, or the changes to the, oh God, the changes to the zoning bylaws of Burlington, people don't keep up with those. And that's the problem. It's so hard to police it. And then you don't know it until you get caught up in it. When you get caught up with it, most people realize they've got a dilemma of spending a fortune to try to be vindicated or just rolling over and saying screw it. And that is not, that should not be how our legal system works. I know. I know that. So what do we do? Well, part of what we do is we do what you do is you fight them. You fight city hall. You say no, you say we're not going to put up with this. It's very hard to do and it's very expensive to do. Well, that's the thing. So that's what I'm saying. How do, what can we do as regular people? Is it a matter of just electing new people? Is it a matter of like overturning these ordinances? Is it a matter of getting normal people who can do math appointed to committees and commissions? I, that's a tough one. I mean, I just think you're dealing with, it's a political culture in the state. It's a political culture in this country. And you've got to change if you've got to change the political culture. So it's manifested in all these levels, whether it's in the judiciary or in the, in the towns and cities, the select boards and the, the, the city councils or whether it's in the legislature is whether it's in these other boards and commissions that they have the more, the more sensitive to and more attuned to the dysfunctionality of what they do. I mean, things sound great on an individual basis and nobody sits back and says, wait a minute. What are the second and third order effects of the unintended consequences? I think that's one of the things that I think was Donald Rubsfield that said this, and I was never a big fan of Donald Rubsfield, but he said one thing that's absolutely true. He says in war, there are three things. There's the known nodes. There are the known unknowns, but he says what gets you is the unknown unknowns. It's the unknown things that you don't anticipate. And that's some of the unknown unknowns were brought up or the, were brought up in the debate about this, this just cause eviction. And they said, wait a minute, there could be an unintended consequence here. You can have a really, a person that's at least a very unpleasant tenant, but maybe isn't violated the law, but it's just short of it. Landlord can't get rid of that person. This person is hostile to people of color, hostile to women. You name it. It could be a homophobe and the landlord is really handcuffed to being able to get rid of it. Those are the laws of unintended consequences. And people that become really, what's the word I'm thinking of? They're very passionate about the justice of their cause. Oftentimes, I mean, we all do this, don't want to hear about the unintended consequences that may happen from what they do. Well, like Sarah George, as an example, she has decided not to prosecute people that commit crimes. And I don't do criminal law. So I don't, this isn't really kind of my area of background. When I say unintended, I'm just speaking of unintended consequences is violent crime has risen in Burlington and in Chittenden County, because there are violent people not going to jail anymore. And to me, that has to be foreseeable. That when we're talking about questions of foreseeable, reasonable expectation, you know, that kind of stuff, like how are some of these things not foreseeable? How does how does the city council not understand that when they raise fees and taxes and all that other stuff, that affordability is going to go down? Okay, let's let's let's get off the set. Again, I don't do criminal law. I don't have a background. I really don't talk about that. But let's let's go back to something I am comfortable with. Okay, rezoning case. Because you just put your finger on it. But what the hell is the point of the city's enforcement against your property having an additional, I think it's what is it, it's an efficiency unit on the second floor of your apartment that was built by your grandparents, which is an affordable unit. People are crying about the lack of affordable housing in Burlington. What is the freaking point in other cases, a companion case to yours guy owns a property on Western Street, not far from me in Burlington. Property has Burlington now has this ordinance called a functional family unit ordinance. Oh, yeah, it says that if you are renting in a dwelling unit to more than four unrelated adults, you have to show to the zoning administrator that they are a functional family, whatever the hell that means. Okay. And so this particular property they've decided in God knows when 2018 to go after this one unit that has been rented to college students, five college students. Since, well, I'll tell you the last time we were able to track down, they actually got a zoning permit for it in November of 1972 on the evening that Richard Nixon defeated George Wood governed. That's how old that one was. So they not as old as your case about when the Beatles were on sale at Sullivan but pretty close eight years later. And, you know, you say to yourself, well, you know, particularly since UVM doesn't it's really, I really have a bone to pick about that because when I was in the city attorney's office in the late eighties and early nineties, we tried to get act 250 to order UVM to house more of its students. Yeah. And I remember in that case, we kept asking a discovery for UVM to give us information of what percentage of their students they were housing. They couldn't give us consistent information. Every time we'd get a number from them, it would be a different number. And it was a mess. It was a total mess. And we weren't successful in doing it. We weren't successful. And that's a problem now. You know, Champlain has been pretty good about housing most of not all their students. St. Mike's house is all of their students. When Trinity was around, they housed all their students. UVM never has the UVM. UVM's always housed about half. Well, yeah, that's a state school versus private schools. What? A state school versus private schools. Would the state require them? Tell me why, you know, like, no, that's what I'm saying. Is that all the departments that are being rented downtown? Yeah. Why, you know, why the university, if a fund isn't required, to buy them up and provided them to their students on an affordable basis? That's what. How hard is that? Or, or better, I think a more radical concept is having students that rather than renting apartments in downtown Burlington, make them owners, have some kind of timeshare. So at least they have equity in the thing. So that, first of all, they have private ownership that keeps the stuff up. And then when they get out, when their term is out of college, they may actually make a little money on it, maybe not a lot. But at least they have ownership of the housing stock. That's an interesting concept. And then if they have something like that. And then I think that was tried in some other community. I think even Berkeley may have even tried that on some kind of basis. Or co-ops or another, if you don't want to do a timeshare, a co-op is another model where the apartment building is owned by a corporation and you own shares in the corporation as a tenant. So then when you turn over, the shares turn over. But there's models to deal with it. But the fundamental problem is you've got students with parents with a lot of buying power that need housing in Burlington. That is a fundamental problem. There's been a lot of housing built. There's been a lot of, you know, cities like South Burlington is, you know, Peter Clavel, when he was married, he really began to press other communities like South Burlington to step up to the plate with affordable housing. They've been doing it. Williston's been doing it. There's affordable housing going up to the county now. It isn't just Burlington. But, you know, you've got demographic issues, number one, with the shrinking of family sizes. But in Burlington, it's fundamentally UVM. It's just, you know, there's that huge demand for housing in town. Do you think, I'm curious, one of the things that I think is interesting, the functional family unit, the no more than four people. This is not necessarily the intent of this conversation. But when we lived in Los Angeles, we had friends because it's so unaffordable, or it's extremely expensive. Let me put it that way. You had people doubling and tripling up in one bedroom apartments where they'd block off, you know, the living room. So it's that person could have a little privacy and then somebody would have the bedroom or they might even have two bedrooms in one room. So there was always people exceeding the occupancy of rooms in the unit. Why is it that I feel like some of these laws and ordinances that are put into place have, you know, we get back to the second and third order effects thing, right? So it seems like there was a reason and a rationality for it, but they didn't consider how that would actually affect people being able to live and comfortably. Yep. Actually, some of the, I was surprised in one of the elections, some of the progressive candidates that were running actually in my ward at Ward 1 in Burlington were campaigning on the repeal of the functional family ordinance. The argument for it has always been that you have all these students crowded into these apartment buildings sort of like as a rabbit warrant. And then you have a problem with noise, you have problems with traffic and cars, you have problem with trash collection and it underbinds the character, the residential character of the neighborhood. That's the other side of the argument. But what happens is what really frustrates me about this is these, you know, now the big thing is people acting as silos, people in little silos and they don't, the silos don't connect. They don't, there isn't the question of, okay, what's the impact of that on affordable housing? The other thing is like, for example, eliminating the amount of cars you can park on the walls of these apartment buildings. That was a big thing. God, that was going on in the 70s and 80s. So all it did is push the cars out on the street. So now what they're doing now is they're trying to eliminate parking spaces on the street because they think that's going to, that's going to do something with the climate change, right? I don't, I don't believe that for a minute. But, and so there's no, there's no, there's no coherent connection. Yeah, various initiatives. I mean, something sounds good and there's a big human cry about that. And then something else sounds good and they're working across purposes. And it doesn't matter if it makes sense or if it's reasonable or how it's going to affect people in the future. It's just like, ooh, we feel good about it. Right. Yep. Now, particularly that with social media, the feel good, the feel good thing. And then if you criticize something, you're an enemy of the people and you need to be, you need to be canceled and shunned. Well, and that's what it feels like the, the one, you know, it's so fascinating. You know, these are the reasons why I don't trust the government. These are the reasons why I think government should be smaller. Like I get into arguments with people all the time about why I believe the things that I do. And I say, I'm a small government conservative. That means I don't think that the government should dictate so much about what I am and am not able to do in my life, in my own home, in your life, in your home, in my business, in my commerce with landlording, which is, that's interesting. So human beings are selfish and self-centered by nature. And then they end up in positions of power. And then we're confused that they do dumb stuff or things that are not good for you but are good for them and their friends. And, and then they give themselves immunity. Levels and levels and levels of immunity. And people are like, why do you hate the government so much, Erica? Why are you a conservative? And I'm like, that's why. Yeah. And nobody can. The last piece of immunity, by the way, we didn't get to. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Qualified immunity, which is what you started out. Ooh, okay. So hold on. Wait, say that again. Qualified immunity. Okay. Qualified immunity is a, I kind of talked about it earlier because of Ramon, lower level officials have qualified immunity. But where you see qualified immunity come up most of the time is in lawsuits that are brought under the Federal Civil Rights Act, which is called Section 1983. It doesn't have anything to do with the year 1983. It just has to be, happens to be Section 1983, Title 42 of the US Code, which is the US statutes. And what qualified immunity says is that, in theory, you consume government officials for violating your constitutional rights. But what qualified immunity does, it puts an enormous hurdle in that that says that the particular conduct, even if it violated the constitutional right, the fact that it violated the constitutional right, has to have been clearly established by some prior precedent and that it violated your constitutional right, has to be beyond debate. Okay. And that's really almost an impossible standard to meet. That's what I was like, what? That's crazy what you just said. Oh well, it gets worse. It gets worse. So you have to show that it's been, this particular fact pattern has some prior case been ruled, and it has to be, by the way, in your jurisdiction, whether it's in Vermont or the Second Circuit, that this is a no-no. And you have to show it's beyond doubt that that was a no-no. And it was very clearly that that was a no-no, and then you consume. But if you can't establish that, then even though the person probably did violate your constitutional rights, the poor official didn't really know for certain that he or she was violating your constitutional rights, and therefore you cannot sue them. Um, there is a wonderful decision that just came out by a judge in Mississippi, U.S. District Court of Mississippi in August, called Jamison versus McClendon. And this judge went, this judge went through the history of sovereign immunity and traced its roots back to the efforts to undo reconstruction after the Civil War. And he talked about how it really goes after really very well. It's like an 80-page decision. Absolutely shatters the reasoning of sovereign immunity. But the fundamental flaw is, how can you establish that a particular conduct with violated constitutional rights, if you need to show a prior case that showed that a violated constitutional rights, but that case can't be brought, because there's been no prior case that showed that a violated constitutional rights. What, this is what, this is what, when this particular judge didn't coin this phrase, but he signed another judge, he coined the phrase and he says, he called it section 1983 meets catch 22. Section 1983 meets catch 22. Plaintiffs must provide precedent that the conduct violated the Constitution, even as fewer courts are making the precedent, because you can't make the precedent, unless you can show there's a prior precedent that shows that this activity is wrong. And there's one example that this judge in Mississippi talked about. It was literally a case, I don't know which circuit it was. Some prisoner was held in a cell, he was held without clothes on in his feces and his own urine for three days. So they brought a 1983 claim against whoever was run into jail. And this is literally the rationale that the court of appeals used. Well, we have decisions that say, it's a violation of your civil rights, as they make you wallow in your own filth for seven days. But there aren't any precedents that say it's a violation of your constitutional rights to be required to wallow in your own filth for only three days. And therefore the suit against the prison officials was dismissed. This is the God's honest truth. That was actually a decision about one of the courts of appeals that was talked about in this Jameson case. So you can see why there's been, there's a growing movement afoot to and by the way, sovereign immunity was completely court created and court created only in 1982. Only in 1988. Really? Yep, yep. What, that, oh, so sovereign immunity wasn't a thing. Qualified, qualified immunity under section 1983. Oh, wasn't, that was 1982. Created by the U.S. Supreme Court of 1982. Wow. Speaking by Justice Rehnquist. Why? Well, in the summer, it happened. Oh, oh, there we are. You froze a little bit. Okay, so it has, so it passed in the Supreme Court in 1982. 1982, yep. So this is a fairly, you know, first of us were the, in the grumpy old men's section over my bar association. That's a fairly recent decision. That's what I, so wait, did you, so what, what, what created qualified immunity? Well, Justice Rehnquist, Supreme Court. They just said. They created qualified immunity for officials who are being sued for violating civil rights under section 1983. And the argument was, well, you know, they really had to be on notice of what they were doing was wrong. And if you don't have some prior court precedent that says that was wrong, then they get out there off the hook because they weren't, they weren't on notice of what they were doing was wrong. So therefore you can allow somebody, you can hold somebody in jail cell for three days and three nights, naked, wallowing in their own filth, and that's not a violent constitutional violation because there haven't been any precedents that say three days is too much, seven days is too much, but there's no precedent. So then the question was, how did seven days ever get decided? It probably shouldn't have been this because that was only decided because somebody slipped one past the goal. You know, so the problem is, is exactly catch-22 meets, section 1983 meets catch-23. I can't, every time we talk about this stuff, John, my head hurts and I get mad. And it's like, I don't, I can't like, I can't, I can't do the mental gymnastics required to make that make sense. Sure, I'd say you're emotionally healthy. And that's what I'm like, I'm not a dumb person. Like I'm, you know, I'm not the smartest person on earth, but I'm reasonably intelligent and I can decipher meaning from things. And that, I can't. Only lawyers could think that makes sense. Or like, was everybody on acid this whole time? Has everybody just been like eating mushrooms and then being like, we're just, we're just gonna write our opinion and some laws. All designed to protect officials from 1983 suits. And the basic idea is that they don't want tax payers to be having to pay out money because government officials violate people's civil rights. Now, what does this relation box about when they go back to reconstruction? Was that these laws were enacted by Congress after the civil war precisely so that government officials would be held accountable when they violated people's civil rights? That was the whole point. Correct. Right. Oh my God, John. Okay. So basically, okay. So I want to leave with some hope. Okay. Because I said, what can we do? And you said, we got to change the political culture so that some of this stuff isn't so nonsense. But also what I'm hearing you say that you didn't explicitly say is we need to get liberty minded people to go to college and be lawyers and then judges. Well, not necessarily. We need to have the people that go to college and become lawyers and judges to actually have a little, I think a little more common sense. They get away from this culture of parsing everything to death. That's all they teach them. And that's very expensive. And I think me. Oh, I'm losing you again, John. Say that again. I'm losing you. No. Oh, did we lose John again? Will it be forever? Okay. There we go. Okay. So you said they that not that liberty minded necessarily that but that people who do go to law school need common sense. Yeah. And also that I mean, the political culture of this stuff I think needs to change. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm left, but I consider myself libertarian. And you say so what really I really get offended by government overreach. It just drives me crazy. I've represented a number of very conservative people. And I'm happy to do it. Happy. Yeah. Yeah. I love people on the first amendment issues where I completely disagree with them politically. But it's the principle of of, you know, the government is overreaching or some officials overreach because they don't like what this person's politics are. Yep. Oh, wait. So you're a real liberal. I'll tell you what you're liberal. I'm not a liberal. I know. Well, I think of people don't realize that our constitution keep in mind that the left in the sixties was libertarian. I mean, that was the Woodstock left. That was the Woodstock left. I mean, it was like, hey, the constitution like people, the constitution is a very liberal constitution. This idea that everybody should get to do whatever they want to do and be left alone. That's actually a liberal concept. What's that? I think that's a very, very much an oversimplification. Oh, maybe it is. All right. So we've come around the hour. We got a lot of really good information. John, thank you so much for everything. I want to give a quick shout out to today's sponsor. It's perihelion design. Beautiful, beautiful jewelry. And that I love. I've got something similar to this, this tree. It is hand wrapped and with handpicked stones. I got a custom one with Aquamarine because that's my birthday and I'm special. She does earrings, bracelets, necklaces, anything. She can custom make you stuff. If you find beads or stones that you think are really cool and you want her to make you something, you can have her do that. And there's actually a lot of her pieces that are one of a kind because of that. She'll find some stone or some pendant or something like that that she thinks is super dope and she will make a piece out of it. So you might even get a $60 necklace that nobody else in the world is going to have. Who else can say that? Let's see. Oh, wait. Okay. Here we go. Let's do this. So as a matter of fact, let me make myself big here. You can see my earrings. Check out my earrings. These are perihelion design earrings. I believe they're called like Egyptian goddess or something like that. They're amazing. They're beautiful. What's that, John? Absolutely. Yeah. Hey, if you've got any, if you've got an anniversary coming up, is it your wife's birthday? You can go to periheliondesign.com. Perihelionvermont.com. That's P-E-R-I-H-E-L-I-O-N-V-T.com to get really amazing jewelry. Check it out. And thank you again, Mr. Franco. If you want to, do you want to share like how people can get in touch with you if they want to have you fight for them for some dumb crap like you're doing for me? You have a website, right? I think I put that in the description. Yeah. I have John Franco Law website. I have an email address. People laugh. It's old school. It's John Franco Law, J-O-H-N-F-R-A-N-C-O-L-A-W at AOL.com. What? Yes. Who has an AOL account still? People who were born in the Truman administration. That's who I think they are. Well, thank you, John. Thank you for fighting the good fight. Thank you for being a part of what is good about being in Burlington and fighting for people's civil rights. I think that's really amazing and very much needed. Thank you, Erica. Be well. Yes, you too. All right, everybody. Thank you. Bye. Bye.