Category: Law School

My thoughts on the law and law school.

1L Classmates’ First Semester Memories

– Law has reason

– The cookie lady… being funny

– No time to do things well

– Midterm nightmares

– Our group being bad at passing papers across the row

– Introducing ourselves

– Engagement

– Variety of personalities

– Getting called on for the first time

– Research Report #2

– School’s care for 1Ls

– Contracts and cases involving women

– Causation expert in Torts

– October was the worst month

– Knowing you can survive

– Forgetting the clicker for Civ Pro

– Hard drive dying the Monday before the Civ Pro midterm

– Torts prof calling on a white shirt instead of red

– Exploding rat case in Torts

– Barry Shanks’ impersonations

– Southern kid getting welcomed to “Yankee Land”

– “Small-town Brooklyn”

– Writing down the reason why we’re in law school

– Feeling like you’re the dumbest person in the room… there’s only one

– Torts prof talking about loss of consortium (man had lost his hand)

– Lack of sleep

– Brad’s dance

– Contract professor assigning wrong problems

– Missing first day of Contracts because of accident on I-93

– Acoustics in the corner of the Rich Room

– Overestimating the amount of stress

– Weekly research assignments

– “Thanksgiving research assignment”

– Learning to like research

– Torts prof saying, “You should be very nervous about the exam”

– CivPro prof reciting all of our names from memory

– Property prof’s Halloween costume

– Question and answer from 1st Circuit arguments

– Every moment

– Getting confused by class

– Practice Torts exam – herd of charging buffalo and resultant dream

– 1/6th done

– Getting to take a nap after class

– Lack of decent restaurants in Concord

– Moving around in class to not get called on (according to prof, it works)… the girl was never called on in Torts or Contracts

– The amount of chalk Contracts prof could get on his face

– Missed Research Report #3 deadline

– CivPro map of Oklahoma

– Learning about the Dram Shop act, then experiencing it in real life

– “Slippery slope,” and something about dime and dollar

– Hating Concord, NH

– Getting called on… big difference from undergrad

– Contracts prof saying something about something

– “I see us as a little family.”

– The coffee… “never drank so much”

– “Rotting jeep” from oral arguments

– Enforcement of “sit in the middle” rule

– Now I can finally sleep in

– Getting called on when not prepared

– Getting called on again

– Contracts professor asking classmate if she was a buddhist because she kept making something out of nothing

– Name cards

– Difficulty with writing $750,000

– Free pizza

– Serious orientation… then the Judges were spinning in chairs

Jury Selection

I learned about a new reality show today in Civil Procedure called “jury selection.” It’s kind of like that old show, Survivor, where they vote people off the island except the elimination of contestants (potential jurors) is based on stereotypes and perceived biases that pertain mostly to race, religion, wealth, and employment. God bless zealous […]

Update 2009: It cuts off.

My Torts Exam Question

Chris has an 8am meeting with new clients at Pebble Beach, but he’s new in town and completely lost on the Monterey Peninsula. In the midst of his cursing and thrashing about within the cockpit of his car, he turned on the built in emergency phone system called OnStar. A woman’s voice came from nowhere, which startled Chris and caused him to veer off the road and into a mailbox.

“My name is Linda. Are you OK, Mr. Rogers??
Chris, mistaking Linda for the voice of God reprimanding him for all of the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll he experimented with in college, started to cry.

“Please, Linda-God. Have mercy on my soul. I promise I’ll be good.?

“Mr. Rogers, this is OnStar. Look at your dashboard. See the OnStar button??

“Oh, hah. Yeah. While you’re on the phone, can you give me directions from wherever I am to the nearest hospital and then to Pebble Beach??

Inevitably, as often happens with these new fangled OnStar devices, Chris, despite following the directions exactly and making u-turns as instructed, found himself completely lost. In fact, he wasn’t just lost. He had come to rest in the Monterey Peninsula ghetto. Yes, there is such a thing.

So, no hospital. No golf. Probably, no new clients. And now he’s lost in the ghetto. Worse yet is that he just noticed that the no-flat tires on his Cadillac didn’t make it their guaranteed 50 miles.

I think it’s quite obvious what happens next. His car breaks down. He is forced to strip from his golf clothes and is beaten with his driver by a 12 year old.

Alternative Liability

Torts was interesting today. We are covering “causation,” which is one of the elements of a negligence claim that the plaintiff has to prove to win a case – kinda. Anyway, to make a longer story short, we were specifically talking about “alternative liability,” which is employed when there are two defendants that are equally liable for a single claim brought by a plaintiff. There are loose restrictions that must be present when using alternative liability, which are:

1. Each defendant must be negligent
2. Proper parties. Generally, there can’t be too many defendants.
3. Harm to the plaintiff.
4. Simultaneous actions by the defendants.
5. Plaintiff can’t prove which defendant is negligent.
6. Defendant has superior knowledge of negligence.

If the plaintiff can show 1-6, or the court finds 1-6 present, then the burden of proof shifts from the plaintiff to the defendant. At this point, if the jury finds for the plaintiff, then both defendants are equally fully liable. That is, if the jury determines that the plaintiff is to be awarded $1,000,000 then the plaintiff can select one of the defendants to pay the full amount. It is up to the defendants to sort out the costs on their own, in a separate matter.

My question is, can the defendants, who are both equally liable, but only one of which will be selected by the plaintiff to pay the damages, attempt to persuade the plaintiff to chose the other defendant?

Zealous Representation

Excerpt from my Civil Procedure book:

The means employed by litigators to achieve victory for their clients regularly involve manipulating people and the flow of information in order to present their client’s positions as persuasively and favorably as possible. This manipulation may involve any or all of the following general techniques:

  • not disclosing evidence that could be damaging to the client or helpful to an opposing party
  • not disclosing persuasive legal precedents that could be damaging to the client
  • undermining or deflating persuasive evidence and precedents that are damaging to the client and are introduced by opposing counsel, by such means as upsetting or discrediting honest and reliable witnesses or by burying adverse evidence under mounds of obfuscating evidentiary debris
  • overemphasizing and present out of context evidence and precedents that appear favorable to the client
  • pressuring or cajoling witnesses, jurors, and judges into adoption views that support the client’s position
  • deceiving opposing counsel and parties about the weaknesses of the client’s case and the vulnerabilities of the opposing party and counsel that have nothing to do with the merits of a given dispute by such means as intimidating an anxious opponent, spending a poor opponent into submission, or “soaking” in settlement an opponent who has public image problems or who for other reasons cannot endure the risk and public exposure of a trial.

None of these techniques is illegal or violates the letter of the ethical rules of the profession. Indeed, the refusal to resort to at least some of these devices may be construed as a breach of an attorney’s obligation “to represent his client zealously within the bounds of the law.”

Midterm Time

I have a lot to do. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed earlier in Contracts, but then I took the big picture approach to everything and decided all will be fine in the long run. I have a Civil Procedure midterm on Friday. It’s take home and we get 24 hours from 3pm Friday to turn it in. That means I get to spend all day Saturday writing about how to bring a case in court. Believe me, I know it sounds fun, but I can think of better ways to spend my weekend. Like watching UM beat Penn State.

Top it off with a research report due Friday at 2pm and we’ve got a great week going.

Time to study. Bought a printer. Go Tigers!