Law school professors are not necessarily skilled at moderating questions from the students. Nuclear Prof. is especially bad at this. Not all questions are equally worthy of elaborate answers, and students who've developed habits of asking unimportant hypothetical questions don't need to be called on at the same frequency as other members of the class. One student in the front row of our 80-person class raises his hand with a boring hypothetical question (and sometimes it's not even clear what the question is) about almost every case. Or he'll ask about the rationale behind the law -- "I don't think that is fair because of such and such... don't you think so?"
And Nuclear Prof. constantly calls on him! (He does the same thing in Con Law -- and probably every class, for that matter, but I only see him in these two -- and gets called on slightly less frequently.) Yesterday the topic in Torts was "duty of reasonable care" in negligence cases. The principle is pretty straightforward: if you're a business owner, you have to provide for the safety of your products and services in a way that a reasonable person in a similar circumstance would. If you're the only employee watching over a barge that's docked in the harbor, and you go on a bender and leave the barge unattended for 19 hours, and it gets rammed by the tugboat and sinks and dumps all of the flour onboard into the river, then you've acted unreasonably. If you were on watch and uncontrollable gale-force winds blew the tug into the barge, and you pumped and pumped water as quickly as you could and still couldn't keep the barge from sinking while providing for your own safety, then that's reasonable. To draw that line of reasonableness might be more difficult given different hypos (what if he left it alone for a half an hour to get some lunch? what about two hours? and so on...), but these hypothetical are infinite! And it follows that the class time we could spend answering them is also infinite!
(Hypos are absolutely important in discussing the law, don't get me wrong. But hypos can be useful when they ask you to juggle two or three or more principles that may come into conflict; they are not useful when you're just making speculations on one principle over and over and over again. For example: a bus driver is driving schoolkids near a bend in the road that overlooks a cliff. A car veers over the center line and is headed directly for the bus. On the left side of the road are two children waiting for the bus; on the right side, it's the cliff. What should the bus driver do? Hit the car (and risk injuring the kids on the bus), swerve left (saving the kids on the bus but almost certainly killing the other two kids), or swerve right (and off the cliff). The hypothetical is pedagogically useful because it asks us to weigh different elements of liability: to hit the kids by the side of the road would be intentional, even if it would cause the least harm. To stay in the proper lane and hit the oncoming car would abide by the laws of the road, but would be the option that guarantees injury to multiple parties. To head off the cliff would certainly save everyone not on the bus, but it could be the most hazardous for everyone who is on the bus. My point is that there are hypos that can put one's understanding of various aspects of laws into practice, and then there are hypos that just try to classify random behaviors on one side of a particular line.)
The point of every case in our casebook is to provide some specific guidance towards establishing "black letter law" -- i.e., the standard elements that we can rely on when making a rule. Torts is the most straightforward class of the four classes in defining black letter law: there are a finite number of intentional torts, and each of which has a finite number of characteristics that have to be present. A case might be difficult, but the structural principles on which a case is decided are not. I don't really care whether front-row questioner understands this, but I do care that Nuclear Prof. indulges his misunderstanding by wasting all of our class time on his questions. I think it took me about two days of teaching to realize that there are students who are going to ask questions off point, and that the way to deal with those students is by spending less time (or no time) answering those questions. My law professors, to varying degrees, are not so good at this.
