Dan Epps

So it's actually, how do you do this in the ten hundred most common words in the English language?

And so I asked it to do it for both...

Olivier and Heck, and maybe I'll do Olivier first, and then we're going to have to circle back and explain what this earlier case, Heck v. Humphrey, is.

So here's the top 100 words version of Olivier.

A man named Gabriel Olivier felt it was his job to go out and talk to people about what he believed.

The city made a rule saying speakers near shows had to stand in a special area far from the group.

Olivier found it too far away to be heard, went back to the street, and police took him away for breaking the rule.

He paid a fine and did not want to fight the case at the time, but he still wanted to speak there, so he went to court to say that the rule was wrong under the part of the law that protects free speech.

The city said, you already lost a case under this rule, so heck blocks you from bringing this one too.

That raised a hard question.

Does heck block your case anytime a court has already decided against you under the same law or only when you were asking the court to say that past decision was wrong?

That's pretty good.

Yeah, I was surprised that court is in the top thousand words.

Yeah, and so this is going to be a case about this earlier decision, Heck v. Humphrey, and I got Claude to give me an even shorter version of the rule there, which is that if your fight for money would show the past decision against you was wrong, you cannot bring that fight until the decision has been taken away.

Do you want to explain that in kind of mid words?

Like not too dumb, not too smart?

Under the same statute that, you know, people have been using in the qualified immunity cases we were just talking about.

So it may be an example.

You were convicted.

You argue that something in that criminal process was unconstitutional.