Every 1L at my law school has the same five classes, which have titles ranging from the straightforward ("Contracts," "Constitutional Law") to the specific-if-not-yet-part-of-the-nonlawyer's-everyday-vocabulary ("Torts") to the obscure ("Civil Procedure") to the completely vague ("Lawyering"). Each class has now met multiple times, and here's a quick description of what they're about:
CONTRACTS is about how you get legally bound to someone else when you agree with them on something. Most contracts are straightforward and everybody is in agreement: you do x and I'll pay you y. But the ones that get litigated are the ones in the casebook, and those are full of conflicting and often confusing claims: if I make an offer to the public, can I revoke it? What defines acceptance of the offer? What kinds of things are considered to be binding even when they're not explicitly written down?
My Contracts teacher is the one who seems like a movie version of a law school teacher. A fat man with nice suits (although the tailoring is quite generous, given his size), a gray beard, a booming, oratorical voice, and a tendency to laugh at his own jokes, somewhat like Jeffrey Tambor on The Larry Sanders Show. (And he is a dead ringer for him too, especially Tambor with a beard!) He loves the Socratic method -- which every teacher uses, but none of my five teachers are as single-minded in the answer they want to hear. His questions feel disingenuous because he'll abruptly cut off anyone with "Not what I'm looking for!" when it's not what he was looking for. Now I do like a teacher's willingness to shut down unfocused responses when the class period is lacking clarity, but Prof. Tambor goes too far. It's boring to sit through his open-ended questions when he's only ready to accept one answer.
TORTS are defined as civil wrongs -- sometimes as "civil wrongs for which there is a legal remedy." If I can sue you for something you've done and am able to collect damages for it, then you've committed a tort against me. My Torts professor, a tall 45ish woman with long brown hair and a headband, has admitted to us that she's spent most of her career defending tort cases for nuclear power companies, health insurers, and Big Tobacco. She is always polite in class and doesn't question students too aggressively -- though again, keep in mind that every class is Socratic, and every teacher is going to randomly call on one or more students in every class. But Nuclear Prof., despite her politeness, strikes me as a genuine sociopath. (Which she should know, given that she is the director of a law and psychiatry clinic here.) She has a very casual, flippant way of joking about liability in cases in which people die or are seriously harmed (and just not in a tortuous way of harm, in which being pushed against a wall by the junior high bully can be a harm that receives a monetary remedy, but in the layman's use of the word harm: being shot, hit by a car, etc.). It's kind of shocking to hear her laugh at these situations. I know that a torts lawyer needs to be able to work on such cases relatively objectively, but I don't think that macabre jokes need to be part of that objectivity.
Nuclear Prof. has also rearranged our schedule without our consultation or approval. We have a bunch of "rescheduled" meetings for the late afternoon when our class is normally scheduled for 10:00... and some are scheduled on different days entirely, which imbalances the reading load for all of our other classes. Still, Torts law is relatively straightforward compared to some of the other topics, so the class hasn't seemed too tricky so far. With torts, it's usually pretty easy to get a mental picture of the events, unlike, say, getting a mental picture of the Judiciary Act of 1789, and the situations in which the U.S. Supreme Court has original and appellate and original-but-not-exclusive jurisdiction. More about that class next time...
