Richard Liebowitz Benchslapped and Sanctioned After Lying Under Oath

TIL "benchslap" is a word that's been in use for some time: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/benchslap

I thought it was just a clever pun at first.

This kind of behavior can kill the legal system pretty easily. Responding takes much more time and effort than committing the offenses in the first place, the sanctions have little effect, and the lawyer continues to practice. Probably he'll just ignore the order to send copies of the judgement to his clients.

The problem is the same with conspiracy theories -- they take way more time and effort to refute than to spin, and the proponents just ignore the refutations.

Of course these aren't distinct -- the conspiracy theories are easily converted into absurd court cases. However in the recent incidents the lawyers seem to have tried to avoid sanctions. Trump should probably have hired sovereign citizens who aren't limited by those considerations.

I think this is a structural problem with our social systems -- they depend on people at least minimally following the rules. If some groups just ignore the rules egregiously enough the system can't effectively counter. Kind of a distributed denial of service attack.

Maybe giving judges the ability to lock up or disbar people like this would work for legal problems. Unfortunately we have no equivalent likely fix for those who spin conspiracy theories -- deleting twitter and facebook accounts doesn't seem very effective.

(June 2020)