Welcome in everybody on this glorious
autumnal
Hawkeye Saturday.
Here we are in the Catbird seat during the noon hour on your mighty blowtorch KXEL.
It's time for Iowa Law Talk with Messers Joseph Piper, J.D.
Esquire, and Nicholas Cratelli, J.D.
Esquire, and I will let them introduce our very special guest for this program.
I'm your moderator, John Jacobs, along with Sean Xavier, our engineer
props to Jeff Stein, News Director at KXEL.
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for over a century.
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Folks, call us.
and right in the email address here is iowa law talk at kxel.com and again just get on your browser and type in iowa law talk kxel and you will get to those podcasts including on soundcloud well guys i'm very excited at this illustrious special guest but i don't want to steal your thunder nick kritelli
Uh, I tip the fedora to you and pass the baton to you.
Take it away, Mr. Criteller.
Okay.
Well, we have a special guest today.
This is Judge Brendan Griner of the Poe County District Court.
And what makes Judge Griner a little bit different is that he has just qualified, John, as a solicitor at the English bar.
As you know, I'm a barrister.
John is, or Brendan is a solicitor.
And I thought to kind of balance things out here
we might want to hear from the other side of the english list of legal system the uh... the solicitor branch as you know the u k has its legal legal profession is divided into two sections barristers solicitors barristers of the guys with the wigs to go to court stand up and bark and solicitors are the ones that have all the fun and puts it all together uh... but i was very impressed with judge grinder who called me one day and said he was
sitting for the bar exam for a solicitor.
And my question to him then, as it is now, is why would you want to do that?
Judge, take it away.
Well, thank you, Nick.
Thank you, Joe.
Thank you, Sean.
This is great to see you guys.
I appreciate the invitation here today.
The why of why I became a solicitor is really just a matter of trying to challenge myself.
I wanted to see if there was something more that I could learn about the law, and there are a number of ways that more sensible people might go about doing that.
But I decided that I was going to sit for another bar exam, and I decided to sit for the most difficult bar exam in the English-speaking world, and that happened to be in England.
And with Nick's inspiration, I
decided to study for about 10 months in 2022.
Self-study here in Iowa, it was during my lunch breaks.
Before I started my job on the bench in the mornings, I would sit down with a cup of coffee and try to go through as much materials as I could.
And then a couple of weeks right before the test, I took some vacation time and took as many practices as I could and much to my surprise, I
I sat for the test and I passed.
Let me ask just a personal question.
Do you ever look back on that and think, what in the heck was I thinking?
I think about that all the time.
I would have been thinking more about it if I hadn't passed.
But
it
was and I was convinced that after sitting for it, I had to wait I think six weeks for my results.
After sitting for it, I was convinced that I had not passed because it was incredibly difficult.
Some of the questions were completely out of that field and not questions that I had prepared for or studied for, but for some reason I was able to find some sensible answer and I did it in enough times that I passed.
Judge, this is so exciting to have you on.
You have a great reputation.
in the state, your Iowa stage and Drake backgrounds, obviously.
And like Nick, you've really carved out a niche for yourself.
What is the SQE1?
What would that be analogous to, if anything, over here?
Is that sounds much tougher than an LSAT, sounds even more difficult than a bar exam, really, in many respects.
It's a bar exam is what it is.
The solicitor is qualifying exam one.
So the
The test is actually in two parts.
The one is the written, substantive portion of the exam, so that's where you have to know and recite the law and apply it to a fact pattern.
It's different in the American Bar exam because it is all multiple choice.
The American Bar exam is usually split between a series of essays and then a series of multiple choice.
This is 360 multiple choice questions, spread out over two days.
There's also an FQE2, Solicitors Qualifying Exam 2.
That is a practical exam, which tests your ability to communicate legal issues to potential clients.
And then perhaps on some occasions, solicitors are asked to present cases of supports or through other tribunals.
even though that much of that has been passed off to the barristers, solicitors still have some role in that.
And so they test their verbal advocacy skills, their written advocacy skills, that's in the SQE too.
I did not have to sit for that portion of the exam.
Being an American lawyer, they said that was sufficient for me to waive that or bypass that.
So I just had to
be able to recite and apply a substantive English law with the first portion of that exam.
You're listening to Iowa Law Talk with our special guest judge, Brendan Greiner.
Judge, I got to ask you this.
One thing that confounds me about Britain, several things do.
One is they drive on the wrong side of the road, but also this idea of parliamentary sovereignty.
Is that driving on the wrong side of the road?
Or do they know something we don't?
I'd love to get your take on this.
So is that a question about the driving on the wrong side of the road or parliamentary sovereignty?
So
that's a very good question.
Parliamentary sovereignty is basically this, that the only people that are allowed to overturn or write, I should say, I think overturn
an act of parliament is parliament, period.
And that's unlike what we have, the judicial review that we have here in the United States was three co-equal branches of government.
They do not see their form of government as different co-equal branches.
Even the sovereign being the monarch is not obviously a co-equal branch.
Parliament really is the heart of their democracy.
The judiciary is independent in that it does not answer to parliament and it does not answer to the crown.
However, if there is something that is within a law that conflicts with a treaty that they have, which is on human rights that they share with Europe.
So if there's something that they think violates, if there's a law that they write that violates human rights in England,
Then the judiciary will take a look at that and wag their finger at parliament and say, you guys got this wrong.
Now go and fix it.
And so then they put it back on parliament, and it's parliament's job to fix it.
But meanwhile, that law stays in effect.
That's parliament-free sovereignty.
John, let me jump in here and give you another view of it, if I might, because Iowa has had quite a bit of influence with respect to UK law in that regard.
a few years you know the english bar sends me a pupil every year studies with uh... one of my pupils got a name of david hughes who you'll hear from another show was one of our pupils uh... after he finished his training here went back and so forth he practiced in jebraltar which as you know is a part of the commonwealth uh... and i got a phone call from one day saying
that he was attacking a statute as unconstitutional under the constitution of Gibraltar.
The appeal from that would go to the House of Lords in the UK.
He was trying basically, it was a similar case to what we would have here in America, as Marbury versus Madison, as to whether or not the judiciary could hold an act of parliament unconstitutional.
This is a major case.
It's the Rojas case.
It was the first time it was
that issue had been before the court and he asked if we would join him in dealing with it uh... obviously jumped at the opportunity to go over and deal with that and then he said well no i really would want trade to do it so my son got called on my visa trade goes over and argues that the house of lords with respect to the concept of parliamentary sovereignty not applying
in the situation where one of the commonwealth countries has a constitution, which is totally foreign to the way they dealt with before, and they won the case.
It's the Rojas case, which is a major case now in the Commonwealth, based upon what occurred here in Des Moines.
The reason I bring that up is that we're in the middle of nowhere here, we think, but we're having a major impact on what occurs in the common law throughout the
the common law world, so much so that Iowa is well known over there.
Another thing with respect to Judge Greiner, that I'm going to disclose here to everybody, is later on this month, Judge Greiner is going to be called as an honorary bencher at my end of court in the Middle Temple.
Okay, as an American lawyer a solicitor as an honorary venture at the bar, which is
a
very very proud of him I'm also proud that one day I got a phone call from Griner out of the blue saying can I buy a cup of coffee?
I'm studying for the The solicitor is examined.
I got a lot of questions.
I thought
my gosh there's another nut in iowa that's doing this so we met and i was laughing almost all the way through it not at him but i thought to myself my god i'm you know i'm not crazy someone else who i highly respect is as crazy as i am and brendan you remember your question was what's the maximum of
equity yeah yeah
There's a whole set of law called equity that we don't really talk about as much as we should here in the US.
But it is a major portion of the English civil law system and it's actually older than our current legal system.
How has this affected you?
in your i don't know how it's affected me as a practicing lawyer but how is all the this education exposure to the common law in that type of thing from an english perspective how is this affected you on the benches a judge here in iowa
well what i can say is that i i haven't up for an appreciation for the historical context of the american legal system which is of english-based and
There are a lot of aspects to our legal system that I should have learned in law school and should have applied when I was practicing as a prosecutor that I didn't.
I didn't pick up.
Then I didn't pick up as a judge.
I think that I've been able to apply a lot of what I've learned, especially with regards to statutory interpretation and equity and other ways of viewing procedure that I
I can now apply in my practice and do it with some authority.
Just look at things differently and deeper.
Yes, I think
that's great.
Now, one other thing, John, is that in his studies, he's been over to the UK and you've actually been on the bench over there with English judges.
Yes.
Have you noticed a difference between the way they judge and the way you judge?
I don't know if I'd say that there's much different.
You know, what's interesting to me as an American practitioner is the way that it is a bifurcated profession.
The barrister is the person who does the advocacy in the court, and the solicitor, typically on the big cases, is sitting right behind that barrister.
And the solicitor is the party to this whole thing that is
driving what the barrister is saying.
I mean, the barrister comes up with a strategy for all of that.
But it's the solicitor who is saying, this is what I want to accomplish today.
And so when you're sitting on the bench and you're watching this interaction, you see the judge ask a question of the barrister.
And the barrister may not know the answer or may not know what the solicitor wants out of that issue.
And so the barrister will then ask,
may I seek instruction or may I have instruction from the solicitor?"
And then the judge says, of course, the barrister will turn around, have a private conference with the solicitor, turn back, and then deliver an answer.
And so you see that interaction, which is completely different than how an American court system operates, which is that the lawyer who is standing up in court is typically the one that is also acting as a solicitor and the barrister and
Is there and is supposed to be prepared to answer any question that the judge has?
Yeah, there's a bright line dividing the solicitor and the barrister and Ultimately, I think it works one thing I've noticed is as a barrister in court over there is the absence of the objections over here lawyers are always jumping up objecting to this objecting to that and we don't see that a lot in courts over there
The rules are you don't run hearsay evidence you have to do this or that and we generally You know comply with those rules over here.
We see a lot of objections Made with it.
They're just not made over there Have you observed that?
I well I Observe that there are no objections made over there that I think if there's a contentious issue coming up then
What I observe is that the person who is basically lodging the objection will stand up and then the opposing side will sit down out of respect for that person and shut up.
And then basically an argument is made on that person's behalf who's objecting to the evidence.
Now, they're not going to object.
They're not going to say objection.
They're going to basically just stand up and say, I'm going to be heard right now on this issue.
But for the most part,
There's no back and forth between the lawyers.
It really is just one lawyer standing up making an argument and then sitting down and giving deference to the other side.
There's a difference over there between what we're on on the American side.
We would say we have to make a record.
And the reason for all the jumping up and objecting and so forth is to make a record later on for judicial review.
That's not as prevalent over there.
Vertics and decisions are reviewed for whether or not they comply with the law, whether they are safe, and that's the term that is used.
Standards of review that we don't have here.
And I've often wondered if maybe we would do a better job if we did that.
I noticed, I tried to case an equity last week, where we took objections, we took evidence subject to objections and those formalities were different, and it went quicker, it was smoother and we didn't have the interruption.
I was wondering, maybe if we adopted a form of there, is this decision safe or a different standard of review, maybe these cases and trials would go on quicker.
You're on the bench here.
What do you see in that regard, Judge?
I don't know if I agree with that.
I didn't think you would.
That's why I threw it out
there.
Well, no, because I really feel that the American practitioners
generally are depending on whether it's a civil case or a criminal case.
It feels as though the criminal cases are run more efficiently here than they are in England.
And they would probably agree with that, especially considering their significant backlog.
And there are a lot of factors that go into that.
But I really do feel that American practitioners, once they strike that,
Let me clarify, American criminal practitioners tend to be more efficient at getting a case submitted to the jury than an English advocate.
What about the lack of war dire?
Over here we get to question the jurors before we select them.
Over there we do not.
We take the first 12 that sit down.
What have you experienced with respect to
But that's a huge difference between the American and the British
system.
It is, it is.
But again, my experience, and maybe this is an Iowa thing.
I don't know how other states might handle these things, but a jury selection for me in a misdemeanor case or a low-level felony case will be done in two to three hours tops.
And there,
They might have a jury selection, but again, it may take them half a day just to get the jury there.
There are going to be a few questions, none of which are going to come from the advocates.
There's going to be an objection to the panel.
Usually, there's no objection to the panel.
And then they start with the case.
Now, Nick, though, keep this in mind.
In England, they're going to bring in 12 people, and those 12 people are going to hear the case.
They don't have alternate jurors.
But they also don't, they can take verdicts on less than 12.
I think they can take verdicts on 10.
And if there's a problem with the panel, they're not gonna know about that until the panel starts hearing the evidence.
And then perhaps, and this is coming from, I think your experience, but I've also heard this from other members, that if there is an issue that comes up during the trial,
where an English juror can't hear that case anymore other than that person is excused and they either have to excuse the whole panel or they and start the case all over again which may take a few months or they just go on fewer than 12 jurors and that that's a that's something that I think the American system actually is is better at English
because you know we're actually right you know we had one go down to we had one go down to 10 yes after a three month trial
Yes.
In January, and we're hoping that nobody came down with the flu, and I'm looking at it as an American barrister saying, why don't we just pick an alternate?
Well, when I raised that with the court, it was just foreign.
I mean, they never heard of such a thing.
Of course, they were curious about it, but it could save everyone a lot of stress and grief and the potential of having to redo it over.
We proposed it, but it didn't go anywhere.
Working in both systems, you see the best of another system and the worst in the same way with ours.
And you look at it, you go, okay, we can improve both of these if we just step back and take a look at it.
Anyhow.
Guys, I just want to just say that I'm going to tell all of you that this great colloquy
between ministers Critelli and Judge Brendan Greiner.
We're so pleased to have him, a district judge in 5C Polk County.
He has been on the bench now for close to a decade and we're so delighted to have him with us here on.
Joe Pifer is going to give you the station ID and I know that after this, Joe will ask something about AG because Judge Greiner, I'm curious about the AG sensibilities over there.
I know when David Vernon in Iowa was grilling Joe Piper and me about Pearson and Post, they went to Blackstone and going back to English law of property and real estate and we're an ag community, so all that.
Joe, let's pass the baton to you for a few minutes.
Give us our station ID and then you with Judge Brendan Griner.
We're on KFCL 1450 on your radio dial and 105.5 on the FM dial.
I get it right?
Close enough.
Close enough, okay.
When I've been over in England a couple of times, they talk about common land.
Have you experienced a discussion about common lands?
Common lands?
No.
Here's what I will tell you about my experience with property rights in England.
They start their whole discussion about property rights with all land is owned by the crown, period.
And the crown bestows this right on the property owners that to have their property held in two different estates, the freehold estate and then the leasehold estate.
And the freehold is basically like owning a piece of property that you can buy and sell at will.
The leasehold is one where one person owns the property, but then conveys a lease to someone else.
Typically, for a term that's not less than 99 years, up to 999 years and anywhere in between.
And it is incredibly bizarre for American landowners to take a look at that system and say, how on earth do you sell anything around here?
And I think they probably ask themselves the same question.
How do you do that?
So that's my experience with it.
When you talk about common lands, that's not a term that I really know much about.
Well, when I was there, I was talking to a person who had been like a conservation commissioner and talked about common lands.
And in the common lands, people could put their cattle or their horses on this land, and they were all mark.
So when it came time to take them off of the pasture,
they would all take them off of the pasture.
And it's very interesting to think about your cattle and my cattle and Nick's cattle all being on this shared property, if you will.
Yes.
It was very interesting to talk about that.
Then they talked about something called the New Forest and the Old Forest in southern England.
The New Forest have been established in the 1100 and the Old Forest has been established in about 800.
Yeah,
that makes sense.
Yeah.
And so it was fascinating just
to talk about it and how differently it was.
And the property is not like we're used to seeing here in Iowa with an abstract in it, looking at it and have the abstract read to make sure we have clear tried.
Since everything starts and stops with the crown, the crown's involved in everything.
What's also interesting are the way that they handle easements, which, you know, they have lots of walking paths all over the UK.
and an easement may go across someone's private property where you've got hikers and walkers just on a day trip and just walking across your land hopping over your fences and that is perfectly acceptable and expected that you're going to have complete strangers walking across portions of your property because there's going to be an easement there.
My wife and I were sitting down for dinner at a private house
And that's exactly what we saw out the window for these people walking across and biking across and said, what's going on?
And they said, well, that's a public easement.
People can walk in cross there and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.
Now, the interesting question that would come to mind for me then is, what's my liability if they fall on that easement?
I don't know, Nick, have you got any experience in that one?
Wow.
Well, they they have they have the trespassers laws they have two of them actually that that that handle that and I think it depends on and It depends on how the land is conveyed as to who is going to be responsible for the upkeep of that but if it's if it's your property and it's open to the public you're you're probably on the hook for maintaining that easement
Something else that I noticed when we were over there.
Who's that?
The son wanted to go drive someplace, so I bought insurance for the day.
Yes, I usually buy driver's insurance for five or six days when I'm renting a car, absolutely.
And it's surprisingly inexpensive compared to the United States.
I think it was maybe six or seven dollars a day.
for private insurance that would cover me and any liability for the few days that I was renting a car.
Yeah, very interesting.
Joe, you refer to common lands.
The most common thing you can find over there is a so-called ride of sheepwalk.
Now, this goes back a thousand years or so.
I mean, really back before the Norman conquest, where
You can graze your sheep over areas that have been in your family lineage for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And these sheep can just roam over this common land.
That's what you refer to on the common land.
But the rights of sheep walk are still there, okay?
Correct.
And this has been protected.
And it's analogous to the right of walking, which is just totally foreign to us.
Now, on the flip side, there's some other good things in agribusiness that we may want to look at over here, and that is when you sell property, you can sell property conditioned that if that property is resold within a certain period of time for an amount greater than X, that the amount greater than is shared with the seller or the buyer, which is totally unheard of over here.
There's some merit to that.
I mean, I've seen these things just in American, and you see the differences.
Your initial reaction is, that's weird and how that would never work.
But the more you see it work, you think, well, okay, obviously it's working.
Could it work over here?
And if not, why not?
And
I guess
the one thing that I got out of out of being practicing in both countries, and Brenna, I think you probably see the same thing, is it deepens your analytical ability and your creativity with respect to using the law to cover different things that
We might not have thought about otherwise.
Judge Griner, two questions that I have.
The first question is you have developed a very good competency in the areas of fraud and white color crime based on your background as a county prosecutor leading into your judicial work.
And as a former retired trust officer, I would tell you that the incidents of
elder abuse and banking frauds and scams and whatnot are just they have exponentially exploded.
My first primary question is just what any takes, if any do you have, are they experiencing similar such things across the pond, so to speak?
And then my second follow-up question is, you know, I think we're rightfully proud as Iowans, I mean, between Norman Borlaug and
Henry Wallace and Herbert Hoover we've we've found out how to feed the world how to save the world from famine and yet oftentimes the middle west here is derided as flyover country is there a zeitgeist that the brits have about the great midwest where i teach as a visiting professor at Ottawa Kansas here outside of Kansas City we have a large international contingent many from britain and uh they love it here uh your your take sir
uh
I think they're very curious about the Midwest.
They obviously have a problem with where Iowa might be situated.
They always confuse us, understandably, with Ohio and Idaho.
When you say I'm from Iowa, they either go with Ohio or they think that we grow potatoes.
So I think they find us curious.
They definitely find Iowa politically curious given our role in the presidential nomination process.
And, you know, I think it's, I've always been met with kindness and mostly just curiosity about it and never anything that would
I just say that they've been very appreciative.
They also want to share about their experiences, and they want to know more about your experiences and try to find the commonality.
That's been my experience.
Yeah, that's great.
Before we segue into the fraud white collar part of the question, I just want to say what you say is so true.
There was a t-shirt back in my days in Iowa Law School in the, shall we say, 1980s.
a famous t-shirt that a lot of the students wore around campus that said University of Iowa, Idaho City, Ohio.
Nicely because of what you were just referring to.
With the issues of fraud, they have the same issues.
Now I will say one thing though that solicitors do over there that are better than American lawyers.
Part of my training was
in money laundering and specific anti-money laundering statutes and laws that were on the books in the UK.
And of course, American lawyers do not get that training.
We need it.
We have an obligation to, especially if we're handling our own trust accounts, we need to be able to say that we know where that money came from.
No one in America gets the training on how to do that.
And we could benefit from that by making that mandatory.
Yes, a very salient point.
But other than that, yeah, they're dealing with the same things with pensioners that are unfortunately being scammed, just like American senior citizens.
Let me ask you, how were you received by your colleagues on the bench for doing
this?
Mostly it's been met with curiosity, like why on earth would you do that?
What do you see the benefit of doing that?
But for the most part,
Many of my colleagues are fairly impressed by it.
I try to encourage them to do it, and of course they all say no.
Judge Greiner, how many other American attorneys are solicitors?
Good question.
I don't know the answer to that, but I can say that when I took the exam in New York in January of 2023,
I think there are a little over 20 of us sitting for the test.
There were only two of us that were Americans sitting for the test.
The rest of them were from the Caribbean, and all those Commonwealth countries down there in the Caribbean have English lawyers.
There are a few law schools down there, but many of them would be paralegals, might be working for a law firm, and they
They have enough training there that English will let them sit for the bar exam.
But then they would travel to New York to sit for the exam with me.
But there was only one other attorney that I knew of from the United States that was sitting with us.
Nick and Judge Greiner, I've got to ask this.
In any sort of real world scenario, is it plausible that we could see Greiner contra Cratelli in a case
that would make Hamilton Burger v. Perry Mason seem mild in comparison.
I'll let Nick answer that
question.
Of course not.
Of course not.
No.
In no world will that ever happen.
He would be handing you the things that he prepped so you could then be the person speaking to the judge.
In other words...
No, I can be the dancing monkey.
You told us that you're the dancing monkey and he would be the one that would be telling you calling the tomb.
Yeah,
I'm the organ grinder.
He's the dancing monkey.
One of you is more adversarial although the Brits don't have an adversarial system.
One of you is more adversarial and the other is simply more objective or can we even say that?
Is that not true?
Well, I think it is an adversarial system.
So I'll put it, yeah.
So it is adversarial in the fact that you have two sides that are competing and the judge makes a decision based on the presentation of the facts of the law.
But it is definitely more, so let's say, so when they're referring to each other in court, they call the other side my friend.
So they don't refer to them by name, but they will refer to the opposing side as my friend.
is something that Americans could start and it would make our core proceedings less... Yeah, there you go.
You know, John, you gotta keep in mind the British personality.
When you're over there, it looks very genteel and very professional and very objective, but the Brits have a highly developed sense of combat.
With a look, they can get more out of the position that most Americans can by banging on the table.
For example, you call the opposing consulate my learned friend.
There's a lot of personality differences, and that's been one.
In a court situation, it's been difficult to put the Americanism behind and adopt the British.
presentation over there, because what comes out from under my wig is American.
It's not English, British.
I have to watch that.
I want to point out one other thing, too, that there is the tradition of sitting with the opposing side for lunch and dinner.
And the old Bailey, which is the historic courthouse in London, the criminal courthouse in London.
On the top floor, there is a mess hall for the barristers.
And during the lunch hour, all the barristers who are half court that day will go up into the mess hall and they will dine together, both prosecution and defense.
And they will have a laugh.
They will give each other friendly jabs.
But it is completely different than
than American lawyers who, I think, sometimes take things too personally and get too adversarial to forget that we are all of the same profession and of the same order.
I mean, we could definitely learn from them on that.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
Subjectivity with regard to advocacy is extremely frowned upon over there.
Their position is, if subjectivity were a hallmark of good advocacy, the client would be the best advocate.
We are bound to bring objectivity to the process and to leave the sniping and all that stuff behind.
Now, that doesn't mean that that always occurs, but the sniping is at a whole different level.
It's very cerebral.
You've got to be on your toes over there.
It's fascinating thinking about my father, the Iowa farmer, who said, I don't see how these lawyers do that.
They go to court and they fight like cats and dogs all day.
And then they go take a drink out of the same bottle afterwards.
And I had to explain to him that it's not personal to us.
It's personal to our clients.
And yes, we're advocates.
But I'm going to see this lawyer again and again and again.
I'll see the judge again and again and again.
And I never want to get on that black list of any judge.
Because if you're on the black list of one, you're on the black list of all.
We've forgotten that though, Joe.
We don't do that anymore and and I wish we would I
mean a lack of education Yeah, you know the fact of the matter is Brennan, we don't get any training over here We have education, but we don't look at the mandatory training that I know that I had to go through at the borrow one UK And you're gonna have to go through okay training is a big deal education
over here is a bigger deal, but no training.
Would you go to a surgeon who was highly educated but untrained?
Why would you go to a doctor or a lawyer who's educated and untrained?
That's how they would look at it.
Judge Greiner, I'm curious your take.
We have, of course, often developed through literature, television, motion pictures, some stereotypical views of the Brits.
Sardonic wit, quick, cheeky humor, Ala Roger Moore in the 70s.
80s with the Bond movies, the stiff upper lip from World War II, perduring from there, as well as decorum, so often a decorum.
Are those fair attributes?
And what do you see is a noteworthy trademark of the British culture that's something that we could perhaps emulate a little better down here.
We've almost done some glancing blows on that thus far.
I think it's situational.
There are some circumstances where that decorum is expected of you, especially if you're going to Nick's Law Society at the Middle Temple.
When you show up for lunch as an American, you need to make sure that you have at least a suit jacket on.
And and no trainers as as they would say no tennis shoes and no G So you know it is it is a professional law society and there is a certain standard that they want to uphold You know, I mean look I don't there there are parts about British culture that I think are are really endearing and There there's something well, I'll give you one example, you know, there's a
I watched a lot of British TV.
There's a show called Slow Horses on Apple TV.
And I'm going to use the term knackered.
So knackered is K-N-A-C-K-E-R-E-D.
Knackered means you're tired.
Now, I didn't know this, but if you are in polite British company and you say that you're knackered, well, that's quite rude and in polite.
Now you can say it amongst your friends, but if you set it to a group of strangers in flight company, they would put their noses up here and say, oh, look, listen to that obscene American going off.
Especially using a British term.
I mean, where does he get off doing that?
Right, right.
We have common language problems all the time.
uh... friend of mine war suspenders instead of a belt and i went to a legal store once and i mentioned that i i need to get a pair of suspenders for for my friend uh... legal and and they just burst out laughing have
a
whole different meaning over there uh... they thought it was a you know
it had
a sexual kind of taste i would totally oblivious
to it i
guess what what i'm saying is that you know you've got to watch the common language
well guys
This is so fascinating, and Judge Griner, I'm really an admiration.
You know, what is a hallmark, I think, of a great man and great woman, and when you're of a certain age, although you're younger than I am, Judge Griner, by far, but I would say you and Nick both exhibit a tremendous intellectual curiosity.
And I have found in my life that people that exhibit that, when they're on the back nine, as I say proverbially speaking, that that mental energy of intellectual curiosity seems to permeate into just that joie de vue, you know, and that love of life and that embracing of the next day and not wanting to be
mothballed.
Who imbued in you that sense of intellectual curiosity?
Was that something that parents inculcated into you?
Was it teachers, professors, mentors, and the law?
Is it just something innate in your DNA that was, you know, genetic, so to speak, or in your very soul?
Well, I would attribute it to my parents and my grandparents, my dad.
I think in his 40s and 50s, went back to get his PhD.
Really?
I remember him doing that.
And so he was a lifelong learner, is a lifelong learner.
His father, he grew up in Emmitsburg.
My dad grew up in Emmitsburg, Iowa, along with my mom.
My grandpa, Griner, was from Webster County originally.
He
I went to Iowa State and got a master's in chemistry and I think he was a soil scientist.
He was also a lifelong learner.
I retired in his 50s from the Department of Agriculture and didn't stop for, went on for another 50 years, always curious and always learning.
So I would attribute that to my parents who, my mom also, she had a, she was very well educated and went back and her
40s and 50s and became a um legal assistant and paralegal and that's how she ended her career
uh judge i don't know if you follow soccer over there but they've got these big rivalries like uh chelsea and manchester union is that approaching the rivalry of a hawkeye uh cyclone sci-hawk game
for
tonight
not even close because they they get violent over there so yeah not not even not even a fair comparison uh and um
But, yes, I think that it's, that is a very good comparison of the rivalries.
And it's still, it's a friendly rivalry.
They probably just swear more, so.
You're on KXL.
Oh, that's understated.
You're on KXL.
Iowa Law Talk with Messers Joe Piper, JDS Squire, Nick Critelli, JDS Squire, and his honor, Brendan Griner.
Iowa judge out of Holt County district court judge guys.
It's time for final arguments How fast this hour has flown remember tell your friends write us at Iowa law talk at kxl.com Grab the podcast on kxl.com slash podcasts or just enter it on your browser type in kxl and Iowa law talk and you will find episodic Till your dreams come true
of great wealth of data to mine from prior programming.
And as always, you can catch us live on here on KXEL every Saturday at noon.
I'll go Nick, Joe, and Judge Griner.
Final arguments, last words.
Take it away, Nick.
Okay.
Well, I saved the best for last.
We've been talking a lot about what Judge Greiner has got from his experience overseas.
I've mentioned that we take pupils in, etc.
But what I haven't told you is what Judge Greiner is doing with respect to how he's trying to benefit the American law student.
And he's going to explain to you at the end of this what he's doing with Creighton Law School and what he's spearheaded.
I'm taking the British students over here.
You're going to hear what he does on the flip side when he gets to him.
As a great undergrad, as a great undergrad who then went to Iowa Law, love the Jesuit schools across the US.
I'll be very intrigued to hear about this.
You really wedded my appetite, Nick.
Joe.
We are blessed that we can learn from each other from the English tradition and from the American tradition.
I know that I've been enriched by
going there and seeing court conducted there and getting a chance to talk to some barristers while we were on recess because there was a fire alarm.
But getting to talk to them about their cases, why they were doing what they were doing, because it was so foreign to what I'd seen here, was an experience I'll never forget.
They were trying to repellent some airplanes and the other side wasn't there.
And I said, how come you're doing all this?
Wouldn't there be a motion for a default?
We're richly granted.
They said, yes, it could be, but then it wouldn't be, it would be unenforceable because we have to go through the Hague Convention and a judge must make the determination of everything that we are saying before we could do the replete.
So I'm fascinated to see how the courts are different and how they're the same.
And I, too, am interested in finding out what Judge Greiner is doing for the Creighton Law students.
Set up for you the final word, Your Honor.
Justice Brendan Greiner.
So, thank you.
I am not a justice.
I will never be a justice, so let's be clear about that.
Judge Brendan Greiner,
my error there.
Well,
you
seem like a very just man, so I'll
play the
attitude for the lower case, Jay.
So, every spring break, six Creighton Law students come along with me to London.
to learn the English advocacy tradition amongst the the barristers at Middle Temple.
They immerse themselves for a solid weekend.
They are given a criminal court case and they moot it.
They do direct examinations, cross examinations, and then they are critiqued and and given instruction on how to improve their oral advocacy skills from these very it's it's not even
these advocates who are above and beyond the best advocates in the world.
And we've been lucky enough to do that now.
Three years, we're gonna go starting again with our fourth year in 2027.
Hopefully we can continue and even expand that program.
It has been a wonderful experience.
And the students come back, I'd say they come back transformed almost every time.
Wow.
Well, on behalf of my undergraduate alma mater, I thank you personally.
Judge Greiner, that is a tremendous addition to the caliber and quality of the Great Creighton University School of Law there, and I applaud you for that, and I appreciate it greatly.
What a tremendous opportunity for students to get that real world experience.
Absolutely magnificent.
Judge, I love to have you come back again in a few months for a follow-up program.
There's so much we can talk about.
with Britain and the United States.
We can take all sorts of vectors and venues.
I want to thank Nick Critelli for securing this great co-host for us today.
Joe Pifer is always great to see you, my Hawkeye friend in my hometown of Hiawatha, Marion, and Cedar Rapids.
And now like yours truly, we have unique vision.
We see better than ever with our cataracts all squared away.
And Nick Critelli
the seeming fountain of youth.
He'll get mad if I tell you his age, so I won't.
I'm just saying I want to be like Nick when I grow up.
And thanks to our great engineer, Sean Xavier, who gets this rolling for us every Saturday on the Mighty Blow Torch, North America's original 50,000 watt KXEL 1540, 100.5.
On behalf of all of us here, be safe, be smart, be good, be strong, and with always,
appreciation to Divine Providence for allowing Iowa to help feed the world.
Till we meet again next time, God bless us everyone.
Bye-bye.