Truth. I once happened to be in a hearing where the judge got the idea that the plaintiff's attorney might be jerking him around. It was an impressive display of wrath. Along with crocodiles and bears, federal judges are now on my "definitely do not fuck with" list.
Playing semantics games is almost guaranteed to piss off the judge. Pissed off judges are not nice.
It's a very long-winded story, so I will try for the short version. Courts default to being open to the public. You can go down and watch them. Chances are, you can even make use of a law library.
Anyhow, this is sort of a hobby of mine. I know, I'm a strange person - but I love watching the court. Like I said, it's a long story.
I think my favorite was a guy who was in district court and argued with the judge about the definition of marijuana and the word possession. Now, the judge was pretty polite and told them that they were trying to give them a very small fine.
The kid persisted and had no idea about procedure. I mean, he could have argued those things but there's a procedure. Procedure is very, very important to judges. Seriously, they love proper procedure so much that they will even tell you what you need to do. She tried to explain this to the kid.
But no, he persisted and tried to fake his way into appearing to be a legal scholar. Again, this was district court.
Suffice to say, he kept going before finally admitting guilt and she gave him the maximum fine and just until the end of the day to pay that fine. At which point he decided it was time to double down and refuse to recognize the court - though not as one of those sovereign citizen things.
I'm not sure what the end result was, but he was taken into custody by the court officers. The rest of the day went quite smoothly.
The best part of this story? He had the chance to speak with the DA prior to this and the State provides an attorney of the day. He took advantage of neither one.
