The

Undeniable

Ruth

®

…and the Ruth shall set you free!

  • Appearance on Kade Dworkin’s Meet My Followers

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    Ruth Carter

    My friend, Kade Dworkin, started a new podcast this month called Meet My Followers.

    Kade Dworkin

    Each show is a 20-minute interview with one of his followers from Twitter.  I was impressed when I saw that he’s challenging himself to release a new show every weekday morning.  So far he’s had some awesome and interesting guests – including me.

    I met Kade in November 2009 when we were both presenters at Ignite Phoenix #5.  He spoke about “The Art of Misusing Stuff,” and my presentation was “Frosting the Law.”  Since then I’ve stayed connected to him and his adventures on Twitter and Facebook.  When he announced that he was starting this podcast and was soliciting guests for it, I immediately said I was in.

    Kade asks all of his guests who they follow on Twitter.  I had to gush about some of my favorite people:

    • Lawyerist: @lawyerist, one of my favorite legal blogs
    • Eric Mayer: @ericlmayer, one of the best attorneys and courtroom advocates I’ve ever seen.  He’s new to Twitter, and his blogs are very thought-provoking.
    • Evo Terra: @evo_terra, my friend that I love for his intelligence, humor, and the fact that he just tells it like it is.  I’m also a fan of the occasional guest tweet from @jmoriarty.  Evo’s podcast is one of the highlights of my week.

    We also talked about why I decided to go to law school and my aspiration to practice intellectual property and internet law, and to keep the crew at Improv AZ out of jail.  I’m glad that there are people like Kade who work in this area who remind me that there will be plenty of work for a neophyte lawyer in this area after I graduate.  You can listen to my episode of Meet My Followers on iTunes or on the show’s website.

    Thank you, Kade for having me on your show.  I had a lot of fun and I look forward to hearing who is going to be on your show next.

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  • Summer School 2010: Improv Acting Class

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    Ruth Carter

    I spent a significant amount of time this past semester applying for summer positions.  With the economy still on the rebound, they were hard to come by.  I made a promise to myself that no matter what I did during the summer before my last year of law school, I got to take improv acting classes.  I had a few experiences in the last year that inspired me to take a formal class:

    1. Captain Eric Mayer, U.S. Army JAG:  I had the pleasure of spending last summer with the Army JAG in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.  Captain Mayer was the defense attorney in the office, and he was phenomenal in the courtroom.  Whenever there was a court martial, I sat in the audience and watched him in complete awe.  He never seemed uncomfortable or at a loss for words.  I don’t think he ever wrote a script for anything he did, not even his opening statement.  When he questioned a witness, he didn’t have a list of questions.  He put a list of the information he needed to get out of the witness to build his case and would check off each one once he got the answer he needed.  I was intimidated by his skills just from sitting in the audience.
    2. Professor Dallyn’s Applied Evidence Class:  This course taught us how to apply the rules of evidence to a courtroom situation.  Every day we did role plays where we took turns playing the parts of the questioning attorney, the opposing counsel, and the witness who on the stand.   The final for the class was a fake trial.  I tried to use Captain Mayer’s approach to questioning a witness, but found myself needing a script of questions and feeling flustered while the opposing counsel and I were making objections.
    3. Improv AZ’s Coroner Prank #2:  I’m a founding member of Improv AZ, a local performance troupe in the Phoenix area.  After our success with the Coroner Prank on the light rail in October 2009, we decided to repeat it at a local mall.  Things did not go according to plan, and we were confronted by the mall cops who called the real cops.  My fellow coroners were former professional improv actors.  When things turned sour, they slipped back into improv mode.  I turned seven shades of white and tried not to pass out while reserving my right to remain silent.  Thankfully the cops let us go after questioning us and the mall cops banned us from the mall for three months.  Check out my legal analysis of the event and the video.

    My class started a little over two weeks ago with Jester’Z Improv and it has been amazing.  It’s a 12-week course that ends with a showcase for our friends and family.  I hope that taking this class will help improve my ability to think on my feet.

    Having been a gymnast and a singer for most of my life, you might think that taking improv acting would be easy. However, in both of these activities, the performance is completely scripted.  With improv, you don’t know what’s going to happen until you’re up on the stage.  It’s a bit unsettling when you don’t know what your partner is going to say or what scenario you might be playing out.

    I went to the Jester’Z Improv show featuring the regular cast and nearly peed my pants from laughing.  Part of me simply enjoyed the show and part of me was a student trying to absorb ideas from the actors and thinking, “Oh geez, these are the games I might be in during my showcase!  How am I going to pull this off?”  It’s going to be awesome.

    Photo courtesy of Jester’Z Improv Comedy Troupe.

  • Is That Legal – Improv AZ Coroner Prank #2

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    Ruth Carter

    Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.  I am a law student.  In accordance with ABA policy, this blog should not be viewed as legal advice.  It is simply my experiences, opinions, and stuff I looked up on the internet.

    Last week the Improv AZ crew decided to revise their world –famous coroner prank, only this time instead of having four people in “coroner” shirts carry a stuffed body bag on the light rail, we took it for a walk through Chandler mall.

    We were hoping to raise a lot of eyebrows and get a lot of double takes and surprised stares of disbelief.  We succeeded in that, but we also spent just enough time in the building to get the attention of mall security.  Not wanting to cause any trouble, we offered to leave.  They refused our offer and called Chandler Police instead.  A mall cop claimed we committed “a dozen felonies.”  The real cop said we could have been charged with disorderly conduct.  In the end, they let us go with a warning and the mall cops banned us from Chandler mall for three months.

    Of course as the group’s CLS, I did my usual research before doing this prank, and after our run in with the law, I rechecked everything.

    What can mall cops really do?

    Mall cops are citizens and can only make citizen arrests.  If they are an agent of the property owner, they can ask people to leave and call law enforcement to arrest them for trespassing if the patrons don’t comply.

    Did we commit trespassing?

    I don’t think so.  Shopping malls open themselves up for members of the public to enter and shop.  We are, in legalese, “invitees.”  If we had been asked to leave by a property owner or their agent and then refused to go, then we would have been trespassing.

    Were we illegally impersonating a government official?

    The way Arizona law is written, we would have to pretend to be a public servant and engage in conduct “with the intent to induce another to submit to [our] pretended official authority or to rely upon [our] pretended official acts” to be charged with impersonation.  We did nothing to assert our authority against any mall patrons or anyone else.

    A mall cop tried to tell us that our fake coroner badges made us guilty of a felony, but anyone looking closely at them would have seen that they were made with someone’s laminator at home.  Our badges had our pictures – mine was my Twitter avatar – and the words “Coroner” and “All Access Pass.”  The mall cop took our badges from us and turned them over to the Chandler police officer.  After looking at them briefly, he gave them back to us.

    FYI – Arizona doesn’t have coroners.  It has medical examiners.

    Did we commit disorderly conduct?

    I think that’s a stretch at best.  Arizona law defines disorderly conduct as engaging in certain behavior “with the intent to disturb the peace or quiet of a neighborhood, family, or person or with the knowledge of doing so.”  The only behavior they could have tried to pin on us was “fighting, violent or seriously disruptive behavior.”   Our conduct could have been considered disruptive, but probably not deserving of being in the same category as violent behavior.  The other behaviors on the list for disorderly conduct didn’t seem to apply since we weren’t making noise, using offensive language, carrying weapons, or preventing business transactions from occurring.

    Could the mall cops make our camera guy prove he’d erased the footage he shot with his phone?

    Mall cops are just civilians so they probably don’t have that authority.  Real cops, however, can search your phone if it’s related to an arrest.  Otherwise, it looks like they’d a search warrant.

    Is it illegal to walk around with a fake dead body?

    I looked through Arizona statutes and didn’t find any laws against having fake dead body.  I find out about some of the things you can’t do with an actual dead body:

    • You can’t move a dead human body with the hopes of abandoning or concealing it.
    • You can’t move a dead body from its grave without authority of law.
    • You can’t steal stuff off or from a dead body.
    • You can’t have sex with a dead body.

    For now the four coroners are banned from Chandler mall.  The mall cop gave each of us a card with the Chandler mall code of conduct on it.  I’d share this list with you (it’s pretty funny) but it’s too long, and surprisingly, Chandler mall doesn’t have it available on their website.

    Related Articles:
    Official Improv AZ Blog: When Mall Cops Swarm – The Coroner Prank #2
    Video: Improv AZ – Coroner Prank 2, “Bob Goes To The Mall”