Judicial L'Awesomeness: Chinese Spy With a Flying Bed

Casebooks are interesting. A casebook author is trying to teach specific issues about law and in doing so, must, with the inclusion of actual cases as examples, severely truncate the opinions of the court so as to get to the meat of the issue and still allow the language of the opinion do the explaining. Editing the opinions of the courts is necessary so the casebook isn't, oh, I don't know, a foot thick. Sometimes, just to further explain a case, casebook authors will include single paragraph summaries of a case to show how that case relates to the one with most of the opinion printed. Here is an example of part of the one paragraph summary explaining Polmatier v. Russ, 537 A.2d 468 (Conn. 1988).

The court held that the judgment against defendant was appropriate even though Russ could not make a rational choice, and shot his father in law for "crazy" or schizophrenic reasons (including Russ' belief that Polmatier was a spy for the red Chinese, and that Russ was a supreme being who could make his bed fly out of the window).

Explaining this case any further would only detract from its L'awesomeness.