Social media legal ‘experts’ to get Honourary Degrees

Citing the vast quantities of insightful expertise and legal opinion being offered incessantly on social media websites Facebook and Twitter, universities across the world have today announced their decision to confer thousands of Honourary Doctorates in Law to what they’re calling “the true legal geniuses of our time.”

According to Law Faculty Deans worldwide, what is most surprising of all is how these amazing and legally-literate opinions have all been produced after seemingly little to no prior study of the law, at any level.

“When we look back at some of the most popular and controversial legal cases of our time – the O.J Simpson trial, the Oscar Pistorius case, the Michael Jackson hearings, or even back as far as the Jacob Zuma inquiries – what we notice again and again is a wave, a veritable flood of thousands of social media users giving paragraphs-long and technically sound legal insights into these nuanced and complex cases,” said Dean of the Witswaterstrand University Law Faculty, Iona Gavel.

“Who would have known that so many hundreds of people, with little – if any – legal training or university knowledge of the Rome Statute, Constitutional Law, Due Process or even Crimen Injuria would be able to produce such lucid, confident, and not-at-all-pulled-out-their-arses legal commentary?” she said. “Often, at just a single glance at the case in question, they can instantly tell if someone’s guilty. Hell, I wonder why we even have universities or law faculties.”

However, many of the soon-to-be Honourary Doctors of Law are remain humble.

“It’s quite simple [how we did it],” explained mechanic and part-time understudy of famed Civil Law Barrister Judge Judy, Ree Parenjin. “You just look at the facts that they’ve reported in the newspaper and on my twitters, think about it for a few seconds, and the truth of the whole issue becomes immediately clear. Some people have an issue with what we say, but really there are some kinds of justice that are better and faster. Ag, some of these old judges have spent so much time in dusty libraries and boring classrooms reading cold, dull so-called ‘precedents’ that they no longer understand what justice is.“

And now, citizens everywhere are looking forward to the promise of a better, more efficient legal system.

“Oscar Pistorius was obviously guilty,” said Parenjin. “In a brighter future, we won’t have true justice delayed or cheated by pesky appeals processes or irritating subminimum standards of Reasonable Doubt. Oscar, those blerrie rhino poachers in the Kruger [National Park], and even corrupt ministers: they’ll all get the death penalty or life in jail, straight.”

Legal experts can’t wait.

“I look at some of the sentences and legal process changes these guys want, and I have to say I’m excited,” said Gavel. “I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”

"Cheat" lawyer receives international recognition

A former Law student is being honoured by several large Law Universities this week, after numerous news articles and reports published in South Africa proved that he was ridiculously overqualified to be a lawyer.

Lwazi Mzozoyana, who was enrolled to read for a Law Degree at Rhodes University in 2005, is to be the recipient of not one but four honourary law degrees, having been praised as “the very definition of brilliance” and “possessing a legal talent and universal public revulsion far beyond his years and legal experience”.

“If we look at his astonishing list of accomplishments – for example, being found guilty of stealing two fellow student’s assignments from a locked submissions box in 2012, cheating on a law of contract exam in 2007, and also being banned from Rhodes until 2022, which, let me add, was previously a lifetime ban,” said Barry Starr, the Dean of the prestigious Law Faculty at Harvard University, “then we can see that, at the tender age of just 33, he’s amassed the kind of widespread contempt and scornful, dismissive public hatred that most lawyers take years to build up.”

“His utter disregard for the laws and rules of both academic institutions and civil society, his disrespect for moral decency, and his brazen attempts to utterly destroy another Zimbabwean student’s reputation and chances of graduation have shown that he is leagues and bounds ahead of even the most absolutely reviled lawyers who defend paedophiles,” explain Starr. “If you add this to the fact that he’s shown no remorse or shame whatsoever, hell, he might even be TOO ridiculously overqualified to practise law.”

The plans to confer these honourary titles and degrees have been met by widespread approval by members of the legal community.

“It’s simply astonishing,” said lawyer of nearly three decades, Sue Primcourt. “It took me years of defending definitely guilty serial murderers, baby-rapers, and underground sex-slave mafiosos to get even half of the spite and derision he got in just years of study.”

However, for Mzozoyana, this is just the beginning. With promise and accolades such as these, it’s only a matter of time before he takes up political aspirations and becomes President.

“If he works hard, puts in the tireless effort and passionate devotion it takes to succeed in the political sphere, then who knows,” said Starr, “Perhaps he could be as much of a thief as Zuma is (allegedly).”

Dear Nigerian lawyer overseeing my dead unknown relative's will

A kindly lawyer in Benin informs me that my recently-dead uncle has left me millions of dollars. I bite.

Text reads:

Dear Klerk.

I am Advocate David Amaugo. A personal attorney to Eng. Michael H. Klerk (my client), from your country who was Director of engineering consultant here in Republic of Benin. On the 5th of March,2010, my client lost his life as a result of Brain cancer, at Benin Medical Center. Since the death of my Client, i have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives until now, so i decide to contact you and need your urgent Assistance to present you to the bank so that the proceed of my client's fund valued about $10,7M (Ten Million Seven Hundred Thousand United Dollars.) can be paid Into Your Bank Account immediately before the funds will be confiscated by the Bank here.

After reading this message, reply me with your direct mobile telephone number... Your full address...Your age....and your occupation so that i can send further details to you for better understanding and also tell you how we can legally proceed the claim. Upon the fund transfer into your bank account both of us will share it 50% for you 50% for me. All I require is your honest cooperation to enable us see this transaction through.

I am waiting your urgent response.

Yous sincerely,

Barrister David A

---Ends---

I reply.

Text reads:

Dear Barrister David,

I was heartbroken and yet grateful for your caring, kind-hearted and obviously not exploitative email. It’s a true tragedy that old Uncle Mike has passed away – to tell the truth, I never really knew him (not at all, not even that he existed, to be honest) and although we had our obvious differences (for example, our surnames) I always thought that if I’d just gotten to know him better, like what his favourite colour is, what his hopes and dreams and fears were, or even who the hell he is, we’d have gotten on famously.

Honestly, though, I was expecting this email. Just last week my best friend Eric got an email informing him that his unknown uncle in Nigeria had died of cancer, and the week before that it was my other good friend Jess. For years now, all my friends, family and work colleges have had to go through the difficult and harrowing process of getting an email from an East African Lawyer telling them of their unknown relative’s demise at the hand of dreaded cancer. Since I was a young boy, I’ve been 100% certain that, somewhere in the world, there is a family member I’ve never met who will die of brain cancer and will me, his last remaining relative, his millions. It was only a matter of time before my poor unknown uncle Mikey met this exact fate.

Of course, some idiots I know on the internet are trying to convince me that this is a scam – perhaps in a blackhearted attempt to take Uncle Mike’s millions for themselves, the soulless fucks. But we have to ask ourselves – if this is a scam, then how come you’re an experienced, trusted lawyer in possession of an internationally recognised degree that qualifies you to deal with the difficult intricacies of international inheritance laws and the complicated string of transnational tax policies that govern the transfer of wealth across national barriers?

If this is an attempt to “empty my entire bank account and leave me in crippling debt”, as these imbecilic nonbelievers claim, then how come you’re such a good, kind-hearted person who would move hell and high water just to fulfil the last will and testament of a lonely dying man. I mean, what kind of low-life, scum-eating, piece of shit, soulless asshat would take advantage of the trauma of the loss of a loved one in an exploitative, black-hearted attempt to cash in on someone’s lack of internet savvy and ruin their lives by plunging them into dire financial straits? Obviously not you.

Please find attached to this email all my personal banking details, three signed and police certified copies of my passport, identity, several telephone and utilities bills going back several few months, and my original birth certificate. No, not a copy – the original. It was tough forcing this physical copy of it into the internet, but if you can track down one man’s sole surviving relative across nearly 5000 miles, well, what is a little digital-physical barrier in comparison?

My best wishes. Please let me know as soon as you can send me the money. I’m writing a book about why Geocentrism is real and how vaccines cause autism and I desperately need money to fund my lifestyle while I cherrypick articles and discredited hack “research” to present as proof of my theories.

Yours sincerely,

Anti-vaxxer, Soothsayer, your loving friend and co-inheritor,

Matthew Klerk

Facebook's lawyers destroyed by simple status

Facebook’s legal team is in stunned silence today, after their seemingly airtight, carefully constructed and extensive 134-page Terms and Conditions legal agreement was undone and nullified by a simple Facebook status.

“When we first started this company all those years ago, we knew we would have to have legal safeguards in place to control content, oversee copyright management, and provide a general set of user terms and conditions that apply equally across our user database,” said the legal team in a lengthy statement this morning, “but how were we to know that a twenty-something-year old in South Africa would have the legal genius to undo all our care and work in one simple ten-sentence status? It was sheer brilliance.”

Facebook now says that, despite their document’s apparent legal strength and imperviousness, this new disclaimer, containing just twenty lines of text, was like kryptonite on an Achilles tendon made of glass.

“It hit us like a sack of bricks,” they said. “I mean, quoting the Rome Statute – a document usually reserved for outlining a court’s jurisdiction, structure and internal processes – was just, wow, incredible. We never saw it coming.”

The creator of the post, who is amazingly neither a law student nor legal expert in any way - says that beating the system like he did requires nothing but clever manoeuvring.

“When you sign up for Facebook and tick the box that says you have read and understood their terms and conditions of service and use, there are all kinds of nasty controls put on your photographs and all your user information that you upload,” said Andy Vokate, whose work has gone on to protect many thousands of enlightened, seasoned internet users, “but when you stumble upon some very clever legal arguments that some companies don’t want you to discover, you’ll see that these contracts are not worth the .txt file they’re written on.”

These legal arguments are incredible, say legal experts.

“We know this argument will be very powerful in court because it’s filled with all kinds of law words and legal phrases like ‘articles’ and ‘hereby’ and, geez, ‘tacitly’. Oh, and ‘foregoing’!” said legal counsel Eric Manders. “And an even more hard-hitting part of the argument is citing UCC 1 1-308 – 308 1 -103 and codes L.111, 112 and 113. Personally, I would quote paragraph 123 subsection a1 of L ACB 123456 or the infamous precendent of Hugh Justin v. May Dissup, but this is as good.”

He added that most judges were amenable to arguments like “really, who even reads these long confusing things? We all know everyone just scrolls to the bottom and clicks ‘Accept’.”

“Especially if they’re an iTunes user,” he said.

However, this post may have opened the floodgates for public legal declarations and defences, with this judiciary tactic being applied to many other industries and services.

“With this new resurgence of customer legal protection, companies are now being force to issue counter legal statuses on Twitter and Facebook,” said Manders. “Pretty soon, we’ll be seeing counter-counter-legal-announcements, and counter-counter-counter-counter notices. It’ll be like Inception, but with more law and less confusion.”

Whatever controversy arises, judges and Facebook users alike agree on one very simple fact: that this definitely is not a hoax.

“This is perfectly sound legal advice,” they said. “I mean, if it wasn’t, would it really be copied and pasted by hundreds of other people? I don’t think so.“

Legal notice: by reading this you agree that I my writing is awesome and flawless and beyond reproach, and deserves some kind of a medal or something. You also agree to share this article with friends and family at least eighteen times.