Good Intentions

Finals are upon us, finally. (That has a nice ring to it, I feel.)

My first one is Contracts, and I’m in the process of studying now. Our prof is letting us bring in anything we want, as long as it’s written and not digital. So that means supplemental outlines! Ha. Especially useful for me, since *gasp* I’m not outlining.

That’s right. For this semester, I’m eschewing the infamous “outlining” and seeing how my normal study habits work out for me. If they don’t work, I’ll switch to something else in the future. But, I am hoping they do work. They’ve gotten me this far, and I’ve come to realize that law school is, in fact, not much different from any other type of school where professors don’t actually teach and the book is fairly obfuscating.

I’ll post updates here when I’m frustrated with or bored from studying. Cheerio.

Well, I got called on not once, but twice, in Contracts and in Torts.

In Contracts, I had no idea it was coming. The cold calls are…well, cold. And random. So theoretically I could be chosen tomorrow. Eesh. Luckily, my prof isn’t a dick. High five for that.

Torts, I pretty much knew it was coming. Prof hadn’t called on our row at all up to this point, and I sit on the end, so he started with me. Oh joy. Actually, it was amusing. He had me pull up Wikipedia and look up when FDR was inaugurated and when television became widespred in America. Why, you might ask? Well, Prof Torts was making fun of Joe Biden. The locquacious senator mentioned to some interviewer that FDR made a speech in 1929 that was broadcast on TV to help assauge fears about the stock market crash in that year and the looming Great Depression.

The problems with this are as follows:

1. FDR was inaugurated in March of 1933
2. Television wasn’t widespread in America until the 50s.
3. The stock market crash was in 1929

So it seems like FDR couldn’t actually get on TV to talk about the crash unless he had oh, say a time-traveling phone booth, and brought a TV back to 1929, kicked Hoover out of office, and then inaugurated himself with magical FDR powers.

But we all know he just had polio, not magical powers.

Anyway, it was amusing. The whole point of that exercise was to talk about causation in fact, which is to say that the defendant’s action has to be causally linked to the plaintiff’s damage. Simple enough.

If I get called on in Civil Procedure tomorrow, I know that God hates me.

On another note, I’m trying to gear up to start my outlines. Dear law school readers, how do you feel about outlines, either commercial or self-created? Hate ‘em, love ‘em, indifferent? Let me know by clicking that lovely “Comment” link.