Judica County Radio hitting the recent Supreme Court Decisions and what it all Means

Coming up on this edition of Judica County Radio, Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer, managing partners, Whitaker and Hamer Law Firm, along with fellow attorney, Cassandra Nicholas.

We'll be getting into Trump versus United States. That's right, their recent Supreme Court decisions, plus the big one. We'll talk about that coming up next, right here on Judica County Radio. Your hosts are Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer. They're the managing partners at Whitaker and Hamer Law Firm. They're practicing attorneys here in the great state of North Carolina. And we're also joined by a fellow attorney at Whitaker and Hamer, Cassandra Nicholas, out of the Morehead City office. And speaking of locations, they are just about everywhere.

Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Verina, Gastonia, and as I just mentioned, Morehead City, where Cassandra joins us from. I'm Morgan Patrick, consumer advocate, always about legal. We get into the hottest topics. We're going to talk about recent Supreme Court decisions. We're also going to give you an opportunity for a complimentary consult with Whitaker and Hamer. So if you've got a legal situation you're facing, you've got some questions, why not take advantage of this? Again, these five complimentary consults will be open today during the course of the show, and you can grab one at any time, 800-659-1186. Again, that's 800-659-1186.

Josh, take it away. Thank you so much for being here and talking about a lot of the U.S. Supreme Court have handed down a couple of decisions. Some of them were a little bit controversial. They've been talked about a lot in the news.

And so we haven't been able to do that. We are now. That's what we're going to talk about today. So Trump versus the United States and a couple of other cases that came out that got a lot of attention in the news. And as always, I think they kind of got reported on a little bit odd, depending on where you get your news, right? Depending on if you get your news from CNN or you get your news from Newsmax or you get your news from the Wall Street Journal or wherever you get it from. I get my news from Josh Whitaker.

That's a good place to get it from. I just wait to come in here and for you to tell me what's going on, man. So the reporting has kind of been all over. This is either the Trump, I'm talking about Trump versus the United States specifically, but this is either the worst news you've ever gotten in your whole life and a threat to democracy as we know it, or it's just codifying what's already the way it was to begin with.

And so it kind of, you know, I've seen it all over the place. I thought, I think we're all pretty reasonable. We've all been attorneys for a good long time, so I think we're probably in a pretty good spot to talk about it very reasonably and fairly. But I will also add, you may be listening to this as early as Friday if you download the podcast or if you're on the radio, you're hearing us Saturday and Sunday, but we usually record midweek.

We can all get together midweek, and we're coming off a weekend where we had a lot of unfortunate news. And so we're going to be talking about Trump, the United States, but we're going to be talking about it right off the heels of, I guess, right? And some people didn't want to call it that, but an attempted assassination.

That's what happened. Yeah, I thought we'd have a nice, relaxing time talking about the Supreme Court decisions. And the headlines about those Supreme Court decisions, as always, are kind of sensationalized. And we're going to get into that about what the reality of each decision says and might mean for the future. But the news regarding the attempted assassination definitely comes first, essentially, even though it's not necessarily a topic directly related to the law.

It's obviously going to have a lot of implications for our listeners, our country. So I think it's important to talk about that first this week. Well, we can talk about it as it relates to the law. It is not legal to assassinate someone. I don't know if you guys knew that. That's official legal advice.

You can bank on that. Let me ask you this question, because I talk about it on the show. I went to school to be an editor of a newspaper, which is an old timey concept these days, right? Thank goodness you got out of that. I went I went to school. I was trained to be an editor of a newspaper. And so news and how it's reported and where it comes from are all very interesting to me.

And so you guys I think of you guys all as you know, everybody here on the show's fairly reasonable, educated person. When that was happening, when you found out, you know, that that was going on, where did you go to get more information? And this will start with Morgan, but I want to ask everybody, where did you go to get information on what was going on? Well, I was in the middle of something else. And one of my significant others, teenage boys, came in and said, if you guys, you know, looked at social media and I picked up my phone and took a quick look. And I was I was I was I couldn't believe it and immediately turned to one of the news channels.

I ended up settling on kind of a cross between NBC and CNN and just kind of going back and forth and and seeing how they were covering everything that was going on. But absolutely just a riveting moment. And I'm so thankful that, well, I should say it's incredibly unfortunate that there was a deceased patron that was at this Trump rally, but very close to having an assassinated former president who is the candidate for presidency this year for the Republican Party. And I just sat there and just kind of took it all in. And I know you guys were probably the exact same way.

What about you, Cassandra? I was at a brewery and got a text from my mother-in-law, which is not traditionally my most reliable news source. And I did I, I went just regular Google and clicked to the news tab and just clicked through headlines from major sources. Once I was home, I clicked between the news stations to see like the the story was a relatively unified one. I think when there weren't a lot of details available, it was just the headline that it happened factually. But it was interesting to watch over hours how those stations kind of diverged in their messaging. Yeah. How are you, Joseph?

Everywhere, my brother, everywhere. I like to look at an amalgamation of every single news source from both sides of the aisle. And I try to do that simultaneously.

So I'll open up 17 tabs on my phone and just start rapidly refreshing. I like the live. I like the live streaming version of getting like I like getting updates and you get a lot of misinformation and crazy crackpot stuff that way. But I like filtering that out myself. You know, I like to get it and then filter through it.

So when something like this happens, like I go like I'll have whatever channel is I see on. Right. But I go to X formerly Twitter. No one's going to call it X for years, but I follow a lot of people are just watching that stuff come in. And like you said, some of it's loony bin stuff.

Right. But some of it is like they they're I don't know. I just it's interesting to see everything come across, come across live, you know, and, you know, there's a lot they know now that they didn't know. But that's there's a lot to talk about there.

I don't know. That's our job here, you know, besides just acknowledging that we're going to be talking about Trump versus the United States right after that happened. And the news got real Trump centric. But I think Trump the United States has been very my opinion is that it's a very basic case that has been over turned into a bigger news story than maybe it should be.

And maybe not every attorney feels that way, depending on your take. But this case was born out of you know, there's a there's a ton of Trump cases going on. And I'm not here to say they're all good or they're all bad, but there's a lot of things going on. But the Trump the case where that was born out of maybe the this was the election fraud when I think I get them all confused. They all kind of come together.

There are a few of them. Yeah, but this this came this came because in one of the cases there was evidence, you know, Trump was talking to his attorney general. He was talking to other federal officials and some of the evidence that was going to be used in this case. He argued or his attorneys argued were born out of his official duties as president. And in doing that, he has some immunity and that can't that can't be used against him.

Right. So this was a this was a case to kind of come out and say if the president has immunity when he's or she's performing their official acts as president. And this has never really come up before because we haven't had in our history a president kind of after he was president face criminal charges for things he did, arguably while president in his official capacity. So that I think I'm safe to say I could be wrong. That's the thing that's never happened.

And so it's never been a thing that's come before the Supreme Court. And now it is because this is all happened. That's my understanding. Well, we're going to talk more about it when we come back on the other side. You're listening to Judica County radio, Josh Whitaker, Joe Hamer, managing partners, Whitaker and Hamer law firm, Cassandra Nicholas, fellow attorney at Whitaker and Hamer out of the Moorhead City office. Also joining us on the program office is located convenient for you and Raleigh Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Varina, Gastonia. And as for mentioned, Moorhead City again, the number to call for one of these five complimentary consults. If you're going through something legally and you've got some questions, great way to get some answers. Call the number, grab one of these complimentary consults, 800-659-1186.

That's 800-659-1186. We're back with more of the recent Supreme Court decisions that have come down. We're back right after this. Back on Judica County radio, hosted by Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer, managing partners, Whitaker and Hamer law firm offices located in Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Varina, Gastonia and in Moorhead City. And Moorhead City office contains Cassandra Nicholas, fellow attorney at Whitaker and Hamer. She joins us on the program today.

I'm Morgan Patrick, consumer advocate, always about the legal. And we're getting into recent Supreme Court decisions. So, Josh, just kind of recap what we've talked about so far and let's launch into the next. So we talked about, we talked about Trump, the United States.

This Supreme Court decision came down July 1. It's been in the news ever since. You know, in the first segment we talked about the attempted assassination of former President Trump and we wanted to talk about that before we talked about the case.

We've had a chance to talk about that. We're going to talk about the case now. But Trump, the United States, you know, we talked about how we got here, where the case came from, why it's even before the Supreme Court. Because I think a lot of people, when I saw it reported, I think a lot of people were confused why it's an issue now. Why is presidential immunity an issue now in 2024? Why isn't this something that's been settled before? And I think that was a lot of confusion because I think people think the president or the former President Trump had something to do with that.

And that's not really the situation. But Cassandra, I think we can skip ahead at this point and just talk about what this case, what did the Supreme Court come back and say? So the Supreme Court said simply that presidents and former presidents have absolute immunity for any actions that were under their constitutional authority while they were president. So that's immunity from criminal prosecution. What the Supreme Court interestingly, well, not so interestingly, it's common for them, but I think that many folks may not realize that this didn't change any of the preexisting cases for Trump. They handed it back down to the lower courts to say, now you get to figure out which of his actions were official actions, official acts of his office that he has constitutional authority for and which ones weren't.

So former President Trump already does have the 34 convictions, but it could come into play in an appeal of those convictions because some of those actions were taken while he was in office to figure out whether those were official acts or not. Yeah, before we were going to try to talk about this last week and it didn't work out. We didn't have time to talk about it, but this would have been before the assassination attempt. But one of the things that I was going to talk about, this was being reported as like the end of democracy. We're going back to a king, and I was going to make the statement that I've heard things are a threat to democracy so many times now, like it's lost all meaning. That phrase doesn't resonate with me.

You can only use it. We don't have a threat to democracy every day. And so that's how this case is being reported by media that kind of favors the left, is this is the end of everything.

The next president is a king. But presidential immunity was already something that was out there. It's just no president has been prosecuted.

Right. It's just not come up until now. And I know some people think it probably shouldn't be coming up and it's not legitimate charges. And some people think it's absolutely legitimate and it needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But either way, the Supreme Court has had to hear it. Like, I've heard people think like the Supreme Court justices, because they were appointed by Trump, they made sure this came up and there was all this collusion. But this is just a case that's come up on its own.

It was important. The Supreme Court needed to sound off on it. And you can disagree with the decision. But I think the decision is pretty narrow and isn't anything crazy to me.

It's what I would have expected. I don't think you want a president who has no immunity. I mean, a lot of our police officers have qualified immunity. And if your town commissioners and your clerk of court, you know, there's immunity when you're doing things in your official capacity. It doesn't mean you can't be impeached. Right.

It doesn't change any of that stuff. It's just there are certain things that you do as president that could put you in a position where you might have some liability when you get out of office. And that's what this case was was all about, or at least that's how I read it. But depending on where you get your news from, it's the end of the world.

And we're basically just Britain now and we're going to have a king, whoever that may be. But that I don't I don't think that's the case. I mean, it's it's true for President Biden as well that, you know, any of the actions he's currently taking as official acts of his position are also protected from criminal liability once he's out of office. So it's it's an equal protection across across the aisle, no matter who's president.

But but I think it's that simple. I think it's that open and shut. And I'm sure we'll keep hearing about it. Judica County radio, Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer managing partners. Whitaker and Hamer law firm. Cassandra Nicholas, also a fellow attorney at Whitaker and Hamer. We are talking about, again, recent Supreme Court decisions, but we also offer up consults. And Joe, you're going to kind of walk us through how these consults are going to go. We have five of them. They are complimentary. That means you leave the checkbook at home. But if I grab one of these consults, what's going to happen?

Yes. So we we love you guys, our listeners, and and and we love to sit down and talk to you. And we want to do it for free. So like you said, Morgan, we're offering five free consults.

First come, first serve. And these are specifically consults relating to estate planning. We think it's extremely critically important for everybody to have an estate plan. We've talked about it at length here on the program. Can't say it enough. The the number of benefits are many.

The number of of of potential terrible things that can happen to you in the absence of an estate plan are also many. So you don't have one. Call us. Come see us. We'll sit down. We'll talk to you. It's a it's a 30 minute consultation and we can we can help start steering you in the right direction to start giving you some real peace of mind.

All right. That phone number to call to grab one of the consults. They are complimentary is 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186. That's a free consult with everything that's going on in your life. If you've got a legal situation, you've got some questions. Grab one of these consults with Whitaker and Hamer.

Eight hundred six five nine one one eight six. Let's wrap up this segment. When we return on Judah County radio, it's time for a question and answer. Again, Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer, managing partners, Whitaker and Hamer Law Firm are your hosts. And we are joined by Cassandra Nicholas out of the Moorhead City office as our third talking head.

And again, we'll talk more following our Q&A segment that's coming up next. Welcome back into Judah County radio, your host, Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer. They're attorneys. They're the managing partners at Whitaker and Hamer Law Firm. And again, practicing attorneys here in North Carolina.

Office is located conveniently for you in Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Verina, Gastonia and in Moorhead City. I'm Morgan Patrick, consumer advocate each and every week. The attorneys go back and forth on legal topics that we are hitting question and answer on real estate today. If you've got a legal situation you're facing, you can always call Whitaker and Hamer, 800-659-1186. Leave your contact information briefly what the call's about. An attorney will be in touch with you, 800-659-1186. Or email your question to the show. We'll answer it on a future broadcast. It's info at judicacounty.com.

That's info at judicacounty.com. Again, Q&A, real estate, the focus. Josh? Yeah, yeah. We had a real estate question before the break, but we're going to move into something else.

We might come back to real estate. But this next one, this guy asking this question, I'm trying to boil it down because it's like a paragraph. But basically this guy was in a car accident, right? He was in a car accident. The parties couldn't settle. He was not at fault.

He was injured significantly or severely. And they ended up going to trial, right? Because that's what happens.

You're in an accident. Sometimes you try to meet, you know, there's a mediation. And there's a whole process to try to settle a personal injury claim. A lot of times they won't settle until you have to prepare for it and go to trial. So this one went to trial. I got one, a judgment. It doesn't have an amount here. I'm going to say it was a million bucks.

And he's basically asking, now what? So he won the trial. The insurance company was on the hook for a small amount.

Let's say really small. Let's say $30,000. So he gets a judgment against the driver that hit him for a million dollars. That driver has insurance, but not enough to cover it. So that insurance company just turns over what they owe.

And his question is now what? And so basically this could be any situation where you have a judgment against somebody. It's nice when there's insurance there to cover it. A lot of times that's what personal injury attorneys are looking for. They're looking for insurance coverage. So sometimes you sue people and they're what we call judgment proof, meaning you can get a $50 million judgment against a defendant, but that defendant may be judgment proof.

What does that mean, Joe? What does it mean when somebody's judgment proof? So yeah, basically if you're judgment proof, it just means that there's nothing for, you owe nothing that a judgment could attach to, right? So you don't have real property that a lien could be placed on.

You don't have, there's just no way for you to realize any value from this judgment. So you could have an infinite, a $10 billion judgment against somebody, but it's only as good and as valuable as the person that the judgment is against. Yeah, this, you know, when we have folks who move, you know, me and Joe, it's a good time to remind you that we're only licensed to practice in North Carolina. So we're always talking about North Carolina law. But when people move here from other states like Florida and Texas and New York, they ask me questions at closing about what do they need, what do they need to do to set this up as a homestead? They ask about homestead exceptions. And in some states you can exempt your residence from a judgment. That's what a homestead exception here.

In North Carolina, you don't really have a homestead exception. You have statutes that reserve a certain amount of equity in your home, a certain amount of equity in a vehicle, certain personal effects. So the statutes automatically protect some of your more basic, um, property from the execution of a judgment protected in a bankruptcy, that kind of thing. And so when we go out to serve our million dollar judgment on his defendant, he's got to have something in, he's got to own something in excess of what's protected by statute. And a lot of people don't own anything in excess of what's protected by, by statute. You know, if you have an extra, if you have a super, you know, fancy car, a lot of that equity in that car, if you have any, he's not going to be protected. If you have a, a big house, you know, only a certain amount of equity is protected. And so this lien, this judgment lien can attach to everything you own.

That's not protected by the North Carolina. It's, it's exemptions, exemption statute. So that's what judgment proof means. Like I can try to collect on this judgment and the sheriff will go out there, not be able to find anything to sell, not, you know, you, you can use a judgment to foreclose on, on real property.

Uh, but there has to be real property that's not exempt, uh, for you to be able to do that. And so there's a lot of protections against a debtor, uh, to a certain extent. And so a lot of times personal injury attorneys will look at that.

They'll say, okay, this is all the insurance that's available, but we know these folks own this or they own that. Um, but that is, uh, that's what's next. And then the other thing that could be next is it could be appealed, right? You know, if you, if you go to superior court in Wake County and you lose, um, you might have an appealable issue and you can go to the North Carolina court of appeals if you have an appealable issue. So that's the other thing that could happen.

You either have to go ahead and start collecting this judgment or in a certain amount of time, the defendant can appeal it to the court of appeals. I think that answers this guy's question. What happens now? Yeah. You're welcome guy. That's a good answer, man. Well, I gotta, I gotta, I lost my light on my next question.

But you were in the zone on that one, man. Like if you never answered another question, like that's your, I feel like slam dunk. I feel like it's a walk-off question. Yeah.

It's a walk-off we should do. I mean, we should do that more, man. Get better and better at answering the same question every week, man. All right. I'm about, I'm about to my next question here. All right.

Well, I'll do this. You're listening to Judica County radio, your hosts are Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer. They're the managing partners at Whitaker and Hamer. And again, office is conveniently located for you.

Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay-Varina, Gastonia, and Moorhead City. And their, their motto, your law firm for life, Whitaker and Hamer. If you've got a legal situation that you're facing, look, we get it.

It can be frustrating. You can get answers to your questions by calling Whitaker and Hamer 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186.

Leave your contact info, briefly what the call's about and an attorney with Whitaker and Hamer will be in touch. We are in the middle of question and answer, doing some real estate, doing a car accident question there. What's up next, Josh?

I got to, the next question I have, I'm going to bounce back to, to real estate. Cause the next question is a private road question. And we just talked about an easement, usually easements, another word for those in the, in the vernacular is a private road, right? An access easement. And so here we've got someone who, who has access. That's not the issue.

So they've gotten over that issue. They have access to a main road versus a private road, but their question is maintenance. And so they're basically asking, Hey, we purchased a home, several homes in the cul-de-sac share a private road.

There is no maintenance agreement. How do we go about maintaining the private road? And so that actually comes up quite a bit. Joe, you, you probably see that a lot.

Yeah, I see it a good amount, man, a good amount. And it's a, it's one of those things. And, and, you know, kind of to piggyback on that private road maintenance agreement issue, you you've also got a lot of people don't understand that when, when a new subdivision is developed around these parts, the roads aren't automatically made public, right? Like you, you're, you're going to the plat of the subdivision is going to be the dedication of those roads to become public, but for them to be accepted, there's various things that have to happen. And there are standards that must be met for the NCDOT or whatever municipality is going to be maintaining these roads to accept them. So there's also going to be a component in those situations where a road is going to ultimately be public, but it's the same concept. You need an agreement in place dictating how the maintenance of that, that road is going to take place.

So you're going to set forth who's responsible for it, whether it's an individual, whether it's a developer, whether it's a group of people and the more firmly in the more, you know, the more well spelled out, you can talk about the obligations of each person and what they're going to do and what they're going to owe and what the maintenance obligation is going to be the better. Yeah. A lot of these, when I think about private maintenance, a private road, in my mind, I'm thinking about a country road.

Yeah. It comes off like a, you know, a highway like off highway 401 and not a, not a plan subdivision kind of like family land. It's been sold over the years. And so it wasn't created with a purpose of other people coming in. And so you end up with a situation where you might have access, which is what a closing attorney is concerned about. They want to make sure you have access if you go buy this property, but the closing attorney is not very concerned about maintenance, but when that comes up, you know, everybody does have an obligation for, for maintenance. But how are you going to enforce it?

How are you going to get everybody to chip in? And this is a big problem. You know, we have some clients up in the mountains and this is always a big problem in the mountains because a lot of those mountain roads see some pretty bad weather and they have to be, some of those mountain roads are scary. Those gravel mountain roads.

Yeah, man, they're scary, dude. They're scared to drive on there's bears and they have to be maintained and they have to be maintained that that can be kind of costly. And so most, most homeowners get together and figure it out. There's always one homeowner who doesn't want to, doesn't want to or isn't able to contribute. And you kind of have to figure that out, but, but hopefully there's a recorded maintenance agreement, you know, and that's something you can ask about.

If you're buying a home on a private road, your closing attorney is going to make sure you have good access. That's something you should ask about. Watch out for bears. Watch out for bears.

Watch out for bears, man. You know. But, but maintenance is sometimes a good question to ask. Cause that's, that's, that's a, that's a, that's a question that can kind of dangle. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to have those questions dangling.

All right. Judica County radio, Josh Whitaker, Joe Hamer. They're your hosts. They're also the managing partners at Whitaker and Hamer law firm. They have offices almost in every corner. They're kind of like a Starbucks or McDonald's.

Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Verina, Gastonia, and Morehead city. Again, Whitaker and Hamer, the motto, your law firm for life. If you've got a legal question you're facing, you need some answers. You can always call the firm 800-659-1186.

Leave your contact info briefly what the call's about. And an attorney with Whitaker and Hamer will be in touch. Again, the number 800-659-1186, and you can always email your questions to the radio show. We'll answer them on a future broadcast info at judicacounty.com. When we return, we've got more question and answer with Josh and Joe. Welcome back into Judica County radio. Your hosts are Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer, managing partners, Whitaker and Hamer law firm. Of course, Whitaker and Hamer, the power behind this program. They have offices located conveniently for you.

Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Verina, Gastonia, and in Morehead city. I'm Morgan Patrick, consumer advocate. If you've got a legal situation you're facing, you can always call the firm and get some answers to those questions. 800-659-1186, 800-659-1186. Leave your contact information, briefly what the call is about, and an attorney with Whitaker and Hamer will be in touch, and you can email your questions to the show. We'll answer them on a future broadcast info at judicacounty.com.

Josh, take it away. You know, when we do this, when we sit around and answer these questions, we hope it's useful. I think the hope is it's entertaining and useful, but at least, at the very least, useful. And we take these questions as they come, and some of them are more interesting than others. But anyway, with that said, here's the first question I got out of our pile here is, how do you get your court case continued?

All right, that's the question. How do you get your court case continued? Now, they're not telling us what kind of case it is, so we're going to have to go through a couple of cases here, but how do you get your court case continued? You walk in, front kick to the door, bam, smack it open. Storm in. No, you go and you ask for a continuance, man.

That's really it. And like you said, the court is going to have leniency in some situations, and they're going to be less lenient than others, and they're going to look at a variety of factors. And if this is the first time you've come to court, it's a minor infraction or offense, assuming this is some kind of a criminal matter, you're likely to get a continuance fairly easily, right? Yeah, I think in traffic court, small claims court, maybe some district court, it's easier to get a continuance. At least once, and maybe several times, right? There's traffic tickets that you may be able to get several continuances on.

You might have to give a reason. And an attorney would, if you've got an attorney, you're going to let the attorney know ahead of time, and the attorney can probably do more than you can walking in the day of. But the court understands, and there's some things built in. Now, it's hard to do without actually being there, right?

So you've already made the trip down. But that being said. But once you move up to superior court, court of appeals, continuances aren't doled out easily. No, you're going to need a fairly compelling reason, especially after that initial continuance, if you get that. Yeah, so when they're set and stuff, superior court is very regimented, things get set for mediation, they get set for trial, and the courts just aren't going to move that, because that inconveniences.

Once you get to the superior court level, you've got witnesses, you've got jurors, you've got attorneys, you've got parties, and usually a lot's riding on it, and it's not as easy to move. And so you should always be ready to deal with a case when it's scheduled, because things happen, people have to go to the hospital, you have health, you have things, but the dog eating your homework kind of stuff is not going to go over very well. Yeah, that's true. And has that ever worked for anything in the history of things? I think I knew somebody whose dog actually did chew up their homework. I don't know if it worked.

But even if they did, did it work? I feel like that's the most tragic thing that can happen to you. If that genuinely happens to you and you have to give that as a legitimate reason, you're going to have a tough time. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. All right, so that question was easy enough.

That's a good question. But I remember, I've seen people in traffic court, which is designed for folks without attorneys, and you get to talk to the judge, you get to talk to the ADA. But I've seen people on their eighth continuance or whatever, and sometimes you're waiting for something else to happen. But that's definitely not the rule. That's the exception, I would think.

Yeah, anything over those very super lowly infractions in traffic court, and you're going to need a fairly compelling reason, most likely. All right, next question I got here is, can you sue a veterinarian for malpractice? That's the next question I got.

Yeah, brother. You can sue a veterinarian for negligence. You can technically sue anyone for anything.

I mean, you may not win, but that didn't stop you from suing them, man. So you can sue a veterinarian or a lot of different people for negligence, right? That's not performing their duties up to the normal standard of care.

And so if they do something wrong, you know, I've seen where some veterinarians have you sign some waivers, right, where, you know, kind of like a doctor, you go in for a surgery, you're going to sign a waiver where any… Well, there's risk attendant with any creature surgery, just like there are for any human surgery. Yeah, and, you know, the law looks at dogs and cats, I mean, their personal property, right? They're the same as a car. Are they the same as the car? Yeah, I guess they would be the same as any personal property.

So it's not a human, so it's not like a medical malpractice, but it's, you know, they screw up your dog, now what's the value of a dog? I feel like we've talked about that before, too. Yeah, we've talked…yes. Have we?

Are you doing another radio show? Did we get into the conversation about if another person's dog bites you? Like it's… Yeah, we've talked about dog bites for sure. Yeah, we've talked about dog bites and the statutes and… We've definitely done dog bites. Speaking of which, man, as an aside, there's apparently a wild, wild pack of dogs terrorizing Barbour Mill Road area of Clayton.

That's always crazy to me. Did you hear that? No, I haven't heard that.

Yeah, I heard that. They're attacking, they're killing like other people's pets and stuff. They're at large to this day. Now are we sure they're dogs or could they be coyotes? No, it's a ragtag group of dogs.

Like whoever's seen them has described them. It's like six dogs and they're all different breeds and they're like… it's not like just all of one aggressive dog. It's like six random dogs that have just formed a gang basically and they're terrorizing the community. It seems like that would be an easy enough thing to stop after the first time. You would think so. Tell it to these dogs that are still at large though. So has anybody been hurt I guess or are they just getting better at it? I think they're getting animals to this point, but you don't want to get rolled up on by the sixth street posse of dogs.

That's kind of crazy though. That should be like an anti-Disney movie, right? These dogs.

Yeah. It's like what was the movie where the dog and the cat and they're all friends on an incredible journey or something. Homeward Bound?

Is that what it is? Well, there's two Homeward Bounds and you've got… I could actually tell you a lot about these movies. They run away from home. They actually don't run away from home. They get taken.

Like anyways. They form a group. They don't form a group. They are in a group. They're a part of a family from the jump, Josh.

And so they… Okay. Well, I was thinking about that movie except they're not good dogs. So it's the opposite of Homeward Bound. They run into some rough characters in Homeward Bound.

The dogs do. You've never seen Homeward Bound, man? I think I had to read the book. I'm pretty sure you've got… I know the dog.

I know the animals' names. But the actors, I think you've got Michael J. Fox as Chance. This is the first one. Both of them. There's two. And maybe there's more. I know of two.

You've got Michael J. Fox and you've got… I'm pretty sure you have Sally Field as the cat, Sassy. The flying nun. I don't know who plays Shadow. Shadow's the old wise golden retriever. Does he die? I don't know who that actor is. I think he's almost… I think he's going to die and then I think he just doesn't.

Anyways, I'm going to look up who that actor is. They usually kill off… That's very important. They usually kill off an animal in one of those movies. Yeah, they pretend like they're going to and then they… Yeah, Disney is usually the man. The mother usually passes away in some form or fashion.

Homeward Bound, The Incredible Journey is the… I didn't know that had a subtitle, but it does. Let's see. Judica County radio. Josh Whitaker, Joe Hamer, managing partners at the firm, Whitaker & Hamer. The power behind this program, your Law Firm for Life office is conveniently located for you in Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Farina, Gastonia and in Moorhead City. A couple of ways you can get in touch with the firm if you've got any legal questions. You can certainly email the show, info at judicacounty.com. We'll answer the question on a future broadcast, info at judicacounty.com. If you need something a little bit quicker, you can always call the firm, 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186.

Leave your contact information, briefly what the call is about and an attorney with Whitaker & Hamer will be in touch. We've got more questions and of course some antics between Josh and Joe. That's all coming up in our final segment of Judica County radio. We're back right after this.

Welcome back in. Judica County radio. Your host, Josh Whitaker, Joe Hamer, managing partners, Whitaker & Hamer Law Firm, practicing attorneys here in the state of North Carolina. And our third host is Cassandra Nicholas. She's out of the Moorhead City office.

And again, they have offices almost everywhere, Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Farina and Gastonia, as well as the aforementioned Moorhead City. I'm Morgan Patrick, consumer advocate. We've gotten into a lot, which coming out of the Q&A, but we've also been talking about that recent Supreme Court decisions that are out there. And I believe we're going to start. Is it Chevron, Josh? We're going there first. Yeah, I think that was another big case that came out.

It was kind of the end of June. I think Cassandra knows more about that one than than I do. So I'll let her tell us about that one.

Yeah. So the title of that case is Relentless, Inc. versus Department of Commerce. And it overruled Chevron. So just for like a two sentence background on what Chevron is, the federal government has all of these agencies.

They perform lots of important functions. Some of the ones that are in the news a lot regarding this overruling are the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance. So Congress makes laws that apply to these federal agencies, but the experts are in the agencies themselves. So if the law is kind of ambiguous on a point, Chevron allowed the experts in these agencies to kind of fill in the blanks for those ambiguities.

However, this new decision from the Supreme Court overrules Chevron. The agencies can no longer fill in those blanks, those ambiguous laws. And courts can't rule or rule using and relying on the interpretations from the agencies themselves. They have to go back to traditional statutory interpretation, look at four corners of the law and possibly background information on what Congress meant that law to mean. But they can't rely on the agencies anymore. So that changes a lot about how federal agencies in the U.S. are going to be able to operate moving forward.

Yeah, it changes a lot. You know, and again, this depends on what side of the fence you sit on, right? So a lot of people would argue that agencies have too much power because Congress delegates to agencies and says, here, EPA, you figure this out, you interpret this law. And people who like that approach, the Chevron approach, were like, good, Congress, they're not experts on environmental law.

Let's have the experts figure it out. The other side would say Congress is the only people that have the authority to do these certain things and it shouldn't be left to the agencies. And so that's what the court kind of decided. Like, you know, these some of these agents kind of depending on who's president, depending on what the goals of that president are, these agencies kind of take different things to heart and kind of enforce things different ways. And I think this will kind of put up I actually don't know what this will do.

You know, I'm interested. I know what the court thinks it's going to do, right? The court thinks this is going to mean that these agencies can't just run wild and enforce things a certain way. And in the real world, I don't really I don't really know how that's going to work.

I really don't know how it's going to all work together. I do think it's good for the courts to tell Congress that they should be doing their jobs, but telling them that and then that happening where they iron out all the ambiguities and laws pertaining to really like complex subject areas, I don't think that's a short term solve that they're going to be able to fill in those gaps very, very smoothly. Right. But there were there were other cases, too. You know, there were that wasn't those were the two big cases. I think the the two biggest that we'll see fallout from. But the Supreme Court kind of just released all these opinions right at the right at the end of their their their year there.

And what was another one that you thought was pretty important, Cassandra? So Snyder versus United States, it had what I mentioned at the top of this show, what I think of is one of the most sensational types of headlines. The headlines regarding Snyder revolve around saying that the Supreme Court is allowing political bribery, allowing politicians to be bribed for specific political decisions and actions. And it doesn't it's not it's not that right. It never is.

It's a little less exciting than that. But I do think it probably will spur some additional litigation. So what it says, all it says from the Supreme Court in Snyder is that federal law doesn't criminalize rewards to politicians for political actions as long as the reward happens after the political action. Essentially, a politician takes action of their own accord and and someone like that action and gives them something in appreciation. A gratuity, essentially. But it has to be after it can't be promised beforehand.

And what it's all it says is that that action is not criminally pursueable, essentially. Well, I think that's I think that's a good summary of that case. And I know we're coming close to the end of the show. And so I just wanted to take a minute, Morgan, and let people know that we we've been doing this for a while now.

We're going to keep doing it. I've enjoyed talking to folks who are listening. And like I said before, we're offering five free consults.

Every time we do a show, we've been offering five free consults. You call into the number that Morgan's going to give you. Leave us a lot of information. Good contact information. So we get back to you if you're the kind of person that doesn't answer your cell phone or you don't have your voicemail set up. We're probably not going to make contact with you.

Right. But but leave us good contact information and we'll see if there's something we can help you out with. At least get you on the right direction. You may want to retain us to take care of a problem, but we'll talk to you for free to figure out if we can be of help to you. So this is not like a hard sell.

I'm not selling you anything, but we're here for you. That's why we do the show. We like to do it. We enjoy it. But we want to be a resource for the folks who listen to us.

All right. To grab one of those complimentary consults, you can call this number. Eight hundred six five nine one one eight six. That'll get you in touch with Whitaker and Hamer law firm. Again, five complimentary consults available now. Eight hundred six five nine one one eight six. If you're facing something legal and you've got questions, this is an excellent opportunity and also a state planning. We've been talking about that today as well. An opportunity to get started on that. Eight hundred six five nine one one eight six.

That's eight hundred six five nine one one eight six. Well, another edition of Judica County Radio is in the books for Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer. Managing partners at Whitaker and Hamer, as well as fellow attorney Cassandra Nicholas.

I'm Morgan Patrick. We will see on the radio next week. Judica County is hosted by attorneys licensed to practice law in North Carolina. Some of the guests appearing on this podcast may be licensed North Carolina attorneys. Discussion on this podcast is meant to be general in nature and in no way should the discussion be interpreted as legal advice. Legal advice can only be rendered once an attorney licensed in the state in which you live has the opportunity to discuss the facts of your case with you. The attorneys appearing on this podcast are speaking in generalities about the law in North Carolina and how these laws affect the average North Carolinian. If you have any questions about the content of the show, you can direct such inquiry to Joshua Whitaker at J.M.W. at M.W.H Law Lawyer.