Douglas Whaley

  “Ender’s Game” is a terrific science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, first published in 1985.   It is about a young boy recruited into a military effort to repulse an eminent alien invasion.   The captivating story quickly became a classic, and remains a top-selling book to this day.   Now it’s about to become a blockbuster movie, opening November 1, 2013, and likely to be followed by movies based on the sequels Card also wrote.   I’ve loved the book since reading it when it first came out, and two year ago I started listening to the series as audio books, thrilling once again to the captivating tale.   But I then stumbled upon information about Mr. Card, the author, that made be give up listening to the audio books, stopping one fourth of the way through the second one, never to go back.     Here’s why I quit: I always knew that Orson Scott Card was a Mormon, but that didn’t mean much to me.   As readers of this blog know (see “Related Posts” below), I think Mormonism i

    No one expects those untrained in law to get legal terminology down pat, but there are some concepts and terms that come up enough that everyone should have a basic understanding of them.   This blog post is meant to illustrate the most common ones.   1.   “Verdict” and “Judgment.”     These two terms are quite often confused.   The “verdict” is the finding of fact rendered in a case in which the facts are in dispute.   If there is a jury then the jury is the fact finder, and will render a verdict at the close of the presentation of the evidence by the lawyers.   The “judgment” (often misspelled, by the way, since in the United States it only has one “e”) is the judge’s pronouncement at the close of the case as to which party wins, and this judgment has as its function the application of the facts found by the fact finder and the rules of law as determined by the judge to the resolution of the issue at the heart of the case.   Appeals can follow, but what is appeal