HOW to WIN in COURT– Without a LAWYER!
Summary
➡ The text discusses the importance of understanding legal procedures when navigating diverse cases like custody battles, unemployment, and copyright violations, emphasizing that being well-prepared and confident can overcome intimidation in court. It criticizes the current state of legal education, claiming it lacks fundamental principles and fails to serve the majority who cannot afford attorneys, which drives the necessity for self-representation and mastery of legal concepts and language. In handling objections and evidence, the text advises focusing not just on winning over the trial-level judge, but building a solid case for any potential appeals.
➡ The speaker emphasizes the importance of legal literacy for the general public, outlining the benefits of representing yourself in court and understanding the rules of evidence and objections. He argues that many legal proceedings could be handled by well-informed citizens, potentially influencing the judicial system and promoting justice. This desire for greater public understanding of the law stems from a wish to uphold the fundamental values of their country and ensure that justice prevails, grounded in truth.
➡ The speaker is advocating for a self-education movement to understand the judiciary and its processes to empower people to make informed decisions, drive change, and reclaim the country. They encourage participation in resources like Dr. Graves’ website that offer knowledge and tools.
Transcript
Graves. Thank you once again. Thank you very much. Well, friends, if you haven’t seen my interviews previously with Dr. Graves, I do have a playlist on my YouTube channel. And this is all about how to win in court without a lawyer. Now, I will just give a little bit of background. I am working with a couple of lawyers and I don’t have like what you would call a typical lawsuit.
This is a petition where I’m asking the court to tell a county to follow the law. It’s very simple. And they pulled out the stops, Dr. Graves, with putting different judges on the case and then having continuations and we are going on year two. But I am persevering as well. And I need to let you know that when I studied your course, how to Win in Court, the information about evidence was so important to me.
So, friends, whether or not you have an active case, whether or not you want to bring a case to court, maybe you know someone who is going through this, I want you to be empowered and educated and actually inspired to learn about this last bastion of standing up for justice and maintaining your freedom. So I’m actually going to stop talking. Dr. Graves. You’re the expert. I’d like to hear just a little bit about your faith in our judicial system and then let’s dive into some nuts and bolts about what we need to know about evidence and objections and these kind of practical tips that we can share with people in our 30 minutes together.
Well, I know the system works and people have often said to me, well, you won because you were a lawyer and there was a lawyer on the other side every time. So I didn’t win because I was a lawyer. I won because when I first started out, I was already in my early 40s, unlike my peers who started out of law school in the early twenty s. And so an elder judge took me aside one time and he said, don’t you lawyers ever study the rules? So I studied the rules and it turns out that because of my background in other things, ocean navigator and degree in chemistry and radio and things, the way my mind works, there’s a lot of things I’m not really good at.
But I do have a way of seeing things in a very simplistic way. And so we could dive right in if it’s okay with you. We’ll just give a little lesson on evidence and objections. That’s fantastic. Let’s take it away. All right, first off, two semesters, five days a week, evidence class. All evidence is is a filter. It’s a filter. I don’t think anybody in law school ever told me that.
It keeps the bad stuff out and it lets the good stuff in. If you know the rules of evidence, which are easy to learn and you know how to object. So there are two R’s, two C’s and two P’s. That separates the rules of evidence. It’s sort of like the phyla of the plant kingdom and animal kingdom. Relevance. Something has to be relevant to be admitted. And by that we mean it has to deal with one or more of the elements, the essential elements in the pleadings or in the crime that’s been alleged.
So every crime that’s alleged has certain essential elements. Usually no more than three or four, rarely five. And those essential elements have to be proven. Or if you’re on the other side, you try to disprove the ability of your opponent to prove what he’s trying to prove. So everything that comes in has to and when we say it’s relevant, it has to address one or more of those essential fact elements.
For example, in a murder case, somebody has to be dead. If it’s first degree murder, you have to show that the death was caused intentionally by the accused. These are elements. They’re real easy to understand. It’s not rocket science. Next thing is reliability. It has to come from a trustworthy source. Another one is competence. That’s a C. The person giving the evidence has to have firsthand knowledge. They can’t just pull it out of the air.
See how simple this really is. When you think about it, the way I think about it and the way my students think about it, credibility. It has to be believable. If a witness says there were angels in the tree playing banjos, no objections. It’s not credible. And then the remaining two, the two P’s prejudice, which is if you were, for example, to come into court and you have pictures of the mangled body of a young child has nothing to do with the elements.
The fact of the child having suffered an injury is enough. We don’t need to show the jury the ugly pictures. So the objection is prejudice if it shocks or going to confuse the court. And the last one is privilege, which most people know about. Husband and wife. The husband can’t testify against his wife about things that she communicated with him in confidence. That’s it. Two R’s, two C’s, two P’s.
But how do they apply? And when? You understand, of course, you need to dig into this a little bit more to understand a little bit more about those two R’s, two C’s, and two P’s, which is explained in the course, but it’s not complicated. And that really does tell the story. There’s some information in there about expert witnesses. For example, an expert witness can offer an opinion based on facts, but a lay witness cannot offer an opinion.
Very interesting. Can I ask you a question about that, then? How do we establish whether or not someone’s an expert? Is it a period of time that they’ve been involved in it, or degrees? Yes, they have to have degrees or wrote a book or they’re professor of biological chemistry or something of that nature. So they have to have that, but then they aren’t there to testify about the facts of the case.
We present the facts of the case to them as they have been allowed into the court file, and then they’re allowed to say, well, if that were true, then this is the likely outcome. It’s more likely than not. But that really is the sum of evidence. And it took, what, five minutes? Well, I love that you had your semesters of study on this and you’re able to distill it down.
And of course, there are some nuances that we go forward. But you know what really strikes me about this, Dr. Graves? This really also forms the basis of critical thinking. So in our everyday lives, when you are putting forth an opinion or analyzing information that you’ve received, these are the kinds of questions that you want to ask. Is it relevant? Is it credible? This prejudice, to me, sounds like, again, swaying opinion through maybe propaganda is too strong of a word, but manipulating perhaps a position or something.
So before we go on, let me just quickly take everybody over because you mentioned your course. And then we’ll get back in and dive in a little more. So, friends over at my website, thehealthyamerican. org I have it right here that you can click on how to win in court. And this is like getting to me. It’s like getting a law school. This is my opinion. I’m not an expert, but it’s like getting a law school degree in a weekend.
If you wanted to power through, I don’t recommend you study it all in a weekend. It could be done. I’m a huge fan of acquiring knowledge because it’s something that can’t be taken from you. It’s a much more positive action to take than complaining about the ills of the world. Why not learn about how you can be prepared? Because if not today, I promise you, one day you might find yourself receiving a summons or wishing to take action.
And this is what I did, is I went to this course, and what I love about it is everything. I’m a teacher, and I love that it is really self directed learning. There are videos, there are worksheets. It is step by step. And here are well, this is just some of the information. And here’s what I want to do. Well, you know what? There’s much more than this where I’m clicking here, Dr.
Graves. But you get all of the quizzes, the forms, the tactics, the diagrams. You can go here, friends, and see all of these testimonials that have come through. And I love it because it’s interactive, it is not boring. And you could put these law schools out of business, really, in terms of here are some of the testimonials coming through. And before we get back to the nuts and bolts, can you tell me a little bit more just about the wide range of cases and individuals that have used this information for success? I mean, there are people trying to get custody of their children.
There are disputes. I want everybody to understand that’s why we go to court. There’s a dispute. Somebody says this, somebody says this, and you need the referee, who’s the judge? And you need to present the information. The judge can’t do anything unless you give him the evidence and your motions. I learned that in your course. But I think some of us think that the judge is going to go home and study and then come back and make click on that testimonials button.
Okay, let’s do that. All right, here we are. We’ve got some coming through. Click on that testimonials and classes. There we go. There you go. Okay, I’ll scroll down. Oh, here we are. This is what I wanted to show everybody. These are real people. Real people. And over to the left is some of the classes that are included in the course. All of that. I want to point out a couple I didn’t mean to interrupt, but here’s one.
Unemployment benefits. I have clients that are suing for that as well. They experienced discrimination, did not get their unemployment. So here, you can take this on on your own. Here’s another one. I sued my employer for violating my copyright. That may seem very obscure to some people, but look at this. $216,000. Here’s another. Defeated a 35 year veteran lawyer I’ve been fighting for the last three years. An appeal in the second District court in Florida.
I want to talk about appeals at some point, but stopping foreclosure, collection agencies so it runs the gamut, everyone. And here’s everything that you’re going to be learning step by step. This is hours of information, but you go at your own pace. You can go back if you didn’t quite get something. You do the test, and you don’t actually get to proceed unless you’ve mastered the previous information.
I suppose you can, but I love all of this. Family court appeals, foreclosures, how to compel evidence using stipulations, preparing for court. To me, Dr. Graves, the confidence that comes from being prepared is going to filter and emanate through everything you do. It’s likely that the reason a lot of people don’t win in court is intimidation. Now, I had to undergo a deposition. I prepared for that. And I like to think of myself as someone that can keep my cool.
But I’ll tell you, it is intimidating to have a panel of five attorneys stare you down with these questions. And I have to say that I held my own and even educated them in some of my answers. One of them even dropped their eyeglasses and said, you’re not a licensed attorney. And I said, oh, no, but I’ve studied the law. So the confidence friends that are listening that you get from this and my audience is very sophisticated and astute, and they don’t like to have the wool pull over their eyes.
So again, I want to emphasize the importance of taking positive action. That’s kind of the bigger picture that we talk about a lot, Dr. Graves, is that don’t give up. Don’t give up on your case. Don’t give up on America. Don’t give up on justice. But anything else you’d like to say before we return to a few more nuts and bolts on how we might be how we might be able to apply some of that? I may have mentioned this at one of our other interviews, but I was at a local bar meeting and the dean of the University of Florida Law School came to the meeting, took the podium, and the very first words out of his mouth were, legal education is failing in this country.
Legal education is failing in this country. And that from the mouth of the dean of the University of Florida Law School, which I believe is the largest law school in the state of Florida. We’ve gotten away from the fundamental principles, these super easy concepts that I teach that make it clear that when you see things the way they can be seen instead of going to three years of law school as I had to do to get my doctorate in law thing so people would pay attention to me.
That was really my main motive in going. I already had studied quite a lot about America, and I love America, and I love the principles on which America is predicated. But our law schools are failing. That’s not my opinion. That’s the opinion of someone who really we should pay attention to that. So what do we do about that? The American Bar Association says that some 82% of the American public, that’s more than four out of five people can’t afford a lawyer.
And some people come along and they say, well, Abe Lincoln said, a man who represents himself in port has a fool for a lawyer. Well, that’s great if you’re not a fisherman, or you’re not wiping tables at the restaurant to feed your children because your husband took off or whatever, or you’ve been accused of a crime you didn’t commit and the public defender wants you to cop a plea and you only have to go to jail for five years instead of 30.
I mean, these things should not be that way. So it seemed to me that it would be a good idea to try to since I do see the simplicity of it. And since I was able to defeat other lawyers who were probably smarter than me, they probably knew a great deal more about many things. But I saw through the simplicity of how this thing works. And I have basically proven for the last 26 years that anybody with an average 8th grade intelligence can learn how to do this.
So let me just go back to what we were trying to get to. One of the things I try to emphasize with people is when you’re talking to the judge or when you’re filing papers in the trial level, you should always be addressing those papers to the appellate court. And that may seem strange because isn’t the judge on the bench, isn’t that the person we’re trying to impress? And the answer is no.
The judge on the bench is the person we are trying to convince that if he goes against us, we’re going to win on appeal. So when we’re filing these papers or interviewing a witness on the witness stand or testifying, we need to be speaking to the record, the record that’s going to go up on appeal because now I have a judge sitting on the bench. Many of them are wonderful human beings.
I’ve known some very wonderful judges. I’ve known a couple that maybe should have been greeting people at Walmart. But most of them were wonderful human beings trying to do a good job. But they don’t know everything. They don’t they do not know everything. So the whole thing about evidence and objections is to make sure that your opponent doesn’t get anything in that isn’t relevant. Like, I remember one case my opponent tried to bring in that my client had been in a fistfight in a restaurant.
Well, my client didn’t start the fistfight, but we didn’t want the jury to think that my client was some kind of roust about. And so we were able to keep it out because it’s not relevant. The case involved theft, trade secrets. You got in a fight at a restaurant, so now you’re supposed to lose your case. These kinds of things can be controlled by just simply thinking, as you say, critical thinking.
What needs to be proven are those essential facts. And for most causes of action in a civil case and most crimes, there are just a few facts that have to be proven or disproven. So one of the objections that I’ve succeeded with, really simple, the other side tried to bring in something in the middle of a case, starts talking about something, some other facts. And I said, objection, Your Honor, not within the pleadings.
You’re trying to start another battle. The case has been on for three months and you’re trying to start something else. No, we’re not going back there. You had a chance to plead that in your pleading. You didn’t plead it. So now we’re not going to bring it up. Now a good one. That really works quite often is when your opponent asks the witness what someone else was thinking or God forbid, what they were feeling.
No one knows what someone else was feeling, and we don’t know what someone else was thinking. So there is an objection. If an 8th grader can’t get this, then I’ll eat my head. Calls for speculation. That’s the objection, Your Honor. Calls for speculation. Well, the witness on the stand can’t speculate about what you were thinking or what I was thinking or what anybody was thinking. We don’t let that in.
But if you allow these lawyers on the other side to play their game and you don’t understand how to make objections such as relevance or this is privileged, or a good one, counsel is testifying. I love that one. Happens all the time. The lawyer doesn’t have your opposed lawyer. He doesn’t have any facts. He doesn’t have a witness. He doesn’t have any documents. He’s got nothing to prove whatsoever.
He just tells the court, well, so and so was on the corner on Tuesday, and he saw the car drive no. Bring so and so into the courthouse. We’re not going to listen to you testify. But I’ve watched lawyers let these things go by, lawyers that were afraid to stand up and object because they thought it was going to upset the judge. Well, these people, my students, they’re not lawyers.
They’re not going to get disbarred. They’re not going to be held in contempt by saying, objection. Counsels testify. The judge will respect them for it. It’ll happen. Like what they said to you, did you go to law school? Badgering. They just badger the witness, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or they keep asking the same question over and over again. So you say, objection, ask an answer. Can we move along, your Honor? And the judge will instruct the lawyer to stop doing it.
You have all this control, and I really, really believe I taught 8th grade one time. I taught biology to 8th graders. They were smart. They’re clever kids, and they can get this once it’s presented to them. I urge parents to get the course and teach their children about brilliant actions. But once you’ve done this, now you’ve made the record clear so that if it has to go up on appeal because the judge is biased or he’s a friend of the opposing counsel, or he’s just stupid, then you’ve made your record so that the appellate court can see clearly that this particular piece of evidence was not supposed to come in.
That witness was not supposed to testify, and you objected. And it’s so simple. It really is super simple. And I may not live to see it, but I keep hoping someday that we’re going to start this in home schools. We’re going to get it into private schools, and eventually the American public will wake up and realize, my gosh, this old man came along here, and he showed us how simple it is and why weren’t we told? I love the idea of getting it into the home, learning and in the public schools.
And as I say, it’s so interactive. Families can learn it together, the parents and the children. And it’s so empowering the powers that want to denigrate what our country stands for, the principles and values and all of that. They want people to throw their hands up and say, well, there’s nothing I can do about this. It’s all downhill from here on out. You can’t fight City Hall. I am fighting City Hall.
I’m actually fighting the county. And it is empowering, regardless of the outcome for me. I stood up. I’m learning. I’m in the fight here. And this, again is positive action that can be taken. That is so interesting of something that you mentioned, Dr. Graves, about the people that are representing themselves, and they are not licensed attorneys. They don’t need to worry about losing a bar license or offending the judge.
And I’m certain some people have been had contempt of court. But my understanding, and correct me if I’m wrong my understanding is that the judges are I don’t know if they’re required, but isn’t there some sort of procedure or principle that you kind of help along the person if they don’t exactly know the law? Like if if the person representing themselves objects at the wrong time, the judge can kindly say that’s out of order.
It’s not your time to talk. Or maybe I’m not giving a good example. How do judges feel about people? We can’t know how they feel. What has been some experience of judges with people that are representing themselves? Is there any prejudice? Do you feel that they help the person along a little bit, or is it just neutral? I think they will do whatever they can to make sure justice is the result.
That’s the goal. Justice. And justice is built on truth. And these tools of evidence, these rules of evidence, and then these tools of objections which enforce the rules of evidence we have the rules of evidence. Two R’s, two C’s, two P’s. Those rules of evidence are enforced by making objections. And it works. And so once you know what the essential elements are, whether it’s a crime or a civil case, these essential facts, which are usually no more than three, never more than five that I can think of, what do I have to prove? Four things.
Four facts. Facts. Did the defendant sell the poison to the plaintiff and was it defective and did it cause his plants to die or whatever? That’s it. We don’t have to have all this other stuff coming in. But when you know how to object and you know the rules, you can prevent the lawyer on the other side from doing what lawyers typically do. Now. They can try to hold my feet to the fire by saying that.
But I know these things because I’ve been in the trenches. I have watched lawyers lie and cheat and twist the rules and try to confuse the judge and disrupt the record and bring things in that should never have been. I’ve watched it. I could give names. I won’t because just caused me a problem I don’t need right now. But I have names. So why shouldn’t the American public understand what this is all about? Learn what the law schools are not teaching.
And maybe someday, by having the public educated and empowered, have the public then begin to put some stops on some of these justices in the high courts that are making decisions that are changing the fundamental morality of this country. And the idea know, is it okay to lie now? I mean, it seems to be okay to lie these days. Lies are good if you get what you want out of it.
Well, George Washington will be rolling over in his grave. So everything that you are doing to promote this idea of public justice education is a wonderful, wonderful thing, Ms. Hall, and I can’t thank you enough. Well, I’m grateful to have you on board, Dr. Graves. I know we’re going to be doing this again in a short period of time, in the coming weeks. And I’m also curious, and we can talk about this next time.
So everybody tune in again. And I want to learn more about the importance of addressing the appellate court. One of the key pieces of information I learned from your course was that for your case, if you’re going to be citing previous decisions by the appellate court, ideally in your jurisdiction about that topic, it’s a slam dunk. They cannot refute it because they are required to follow that higher court.
That’s a topic we can let’s dive into that next time because for me, that in the case, preparation is just monumentally important. And I want everybody else to know. And Dr. Graves is very modest. I want to promote this course and shout it from the rooftops. And I also need to say that it’s extremely affordable. If you’re thinking about comparing this to going to law school, he would need to add a couple of zeros to the end of the price to even get close to what law school degrees are at least $100,000.
And this is under $300 last I checked. It’s an investment in you, in this country, in your future. What a wonderful gift to give to a young person who isn’t quite sure what they want to do. Maybe they will go on and become a licensed attorney down the road if that’s something, because they can get their interests going with learning about how accessible this information is. I’m so grateful for you, Dr.
Graves. I’ll give you the last word here. Anything else you’d like to close out with for our audience? I love America. I believe America is a set of rules. It’s a place, it’s a country. It has waving fields of wheat and see the shining shore and all of that. I know all that. And I know that far too many people have lost their lives, given their very lives, to preserve our liberty.
And what I beg the world to understand someday, whether it comes from me or you or someone else, is that without the rules, you have no liberty, without the ability to enforce your rights, without having to mortgage the home and hope to heaven you got a lawyer. That’s honest. So, yes, we are so thankful for people who have made the ultimate sacrifice. But when it really comes down to it, as General MacArthur on that battleship in the Philippines at the end of World War II, all of that blood came down to his picking up a pen and putting some ink on paper.
And we can do this. We don’t need the lawyers to do our thinking for us. And final word, we don’t need appellate court justices to become secular priests in this nation and teach our children what right and wrong is if they’re going to go off the rails and teach this modern, terrible, godless idea about what’s right and wrong, we can control the judiciary, but not if we don’t know how it works.
And if you can learn how it works in a very short period of time and help your neighbors and get together with your neighbors and start your church or your kiwanis club or wherever it is and get together and learn the rules of evidence and learn how to object, learn what a pleading is and what a cause of action is and what the elements of a crime are and what has to be proven and how to force the other side to back down and do what’s right.
We can take this country back from the lawyers. Well, that is music to my ears. And I know people that are listening are shaking, are nodding their heads in agreement and shaking their heads in frustration with kind of the way that we’ve seen the country going. And I’m like you. I am very optimistic. I believe in what our country stands for, the concepts, the values, and the principles.
And I’ve said that I am fighting this all the way to heaven. So thank you so much, Dr. Graves. Stick on with me for just a moment. Friends, you can always find me. I want you to join my substac. It’s a free type of blog, and that’s Peggyhall substac. com. And then most importantly, go on over to thehealthyamerican. org click on that how to Win in Court on the banner, and you’ll be able to have that’ll take you right to Dr.
Graves’website where you can click around, see what he has to offer, get yourself educated and knowledgeable so that you are empowered to take action. Thank you so much, Dr. Graves. And we will. See you in an upcoming broadcast in just few weeks. Thank you. Bye. .
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