No one needs to go to trial to become an authority let alone an expert in the law.
If they are good enough to teach new students the law, legal analysis, etc. without any courtroom experience...well shit, then Shapiro has the exact same qualifications to speak on a federal bullshit indictment dreamed up through asinine novel legal theories just to go after Biden's political opponent.
You do not understand what an authority is in a logical context.
We're talking about logical fallacies, so the question here is about what would render a conclusion to be rational.
The qualification of someone as an authority is relative to the access one has to the needed expertise and the selection process that follows.
If I am feeling ill and I call my cousin who is a nurse and she tells me I'm fine, I am being rational in that situation to accept her as an authority on my ailment because among us she would know far more about this than I. If I later go to a hospital and am diagnosed by a doctor with 30 years practicing medicine who tells me the opposite, my cousin is no longer a valid authority because I now have access to someone with higher crudentials.
When you have access to people with higher crudentials and you decide to accept the word of someone with lesser crudentials, you are exercising selection bias. That entirely defies the concept of an authority.
In this case we're talking about a federal indictment in a highly politicized case. You could right now use Google and find the legal opinion of prosecutors, judges, legal scholars, etc. all over the world weighing in on this. Yet you skipped over all of them to pick some guy on the basis that he passed the bar exam, something literally millions of people in this country have done. That's called cherry picking.
As I have already explained, you keep qualifying him on the basis that you find him smart and you agree with his analysis. If that's the case then you are not listening to him because he's an authority, you are listening to him because you personally determined his analysis to be the correct one. That is not an appeal to authority.
I stood up. Pissed them off to no end. Got five attorneys fired, as well as the firm in the end.
So no, one does not need a "trial," civil or criminal, to be an "authority" on the law.
It's a cool story, but has little to do with the concept of an an authority. The jist is that you managed to be successful in a venture where you were disadvantaged from the standpoint of experience in formal education. Anyone in theory, could accomplish the same, so this argument if anything supports the position that there are no authorities.
Before I said that what makes someone an authority is experience. Clearly with you I need to be more precise so I started using the word crudentials. Crudentials is better because it's all encompassing, it includes experience, education, and most importantly... A track record of getting results.
You don't become an authority among your profession in law, science, medicine, etc with education. Everyone has that. Experience? Everyone has that too. You become a leading expert/authority when you can demonstrate that you know what you're doing by getting results. A lawyer who keeps losing cases is not an authority. A doctor whose patients keep dying is not an authority.
An authority is someone you have reason to listen to before you know what they are going say. I have no reason to listen to Ben Shapiro about federal indictment over, say, a former attorney general who Trump hand picked himself.
Being an authority does not mean you are right. It means one is being rational to give your analysis greater weight on the basis of your crudentials.
So, I know what I am talking about, and you CLEARLY do not.
Then you should have no problem dismantling my argument without having to resort to insults and bold declarations of how right you are.
So go on, finally... dismantle post 40.
