Thrive wrote:
1) Why o Why do teachers have this amazing skill of making things seem more complicated than they actually are?
Several answers. They are academics, or at least pseudo-academics, so extrapolating nuance from and reinterpreting otherwise simple models and explanations constitutes most of their scholarship. As a result, law textbooks feature cases that exemplify the most extreme, random situations that could arise where there's a genuinely novel legal conflict. Like, some of this shit
would never happen except for those two times it did, and twenty five law review articles were written about it. Some of the cases are included to show the evolution of rules, and they really don't need to be that complicated, but the purpose of their inclusion is to illustrate some more flavorful point.
Thrive wrote:
2) Why does my teacher spend 2 minutes in the most important takeaway from a case but spends an hour and 18 minutes talking about the stupid context surrounding the case that nobody will remember in 2 weeks?
Because learning the common law rule or statutory application from the holding is the easiest part of the exercise, while working with and understanding the facts of the case and the underlying institutional or policy considerations entails much more thought and skill. It's what you will do on the exam (and "in theory" as a litigator), persuasively framing the facts to serve an advantageous legal argument for your client (i.e. the side you chose on the issue spotter hypo). If your teacher spent a lot of class time trying to teach you what the rule or statute was and didn't delve into the facts/context, that would be pretty TTT.
Thrive wrote:
3) do they just want to sound smart or am I missing something here?
of course your professor wants to sound smart. they probably also are pretty smart. Do you have any idea what it takes to become a law professor? aside from the masturbatory academic bullshit. If they presented you with basic information with no complexity or nuance and sounded bland, wouldn't you wonder what you were paying for? (added value for what we pay is already ridiculous, but it would just be more ridiculous).
Thrive wrote:
4) Why am I spending an hour+ listening to a lecture on properties...in Contracts??
Contract, Property, Tort are basically the same, especially if you delve in from a law and economics perspective. read Gilmore's Death of Contract as a starting place. They have different formalities and mechanisms, but most tort and contract cases will relate to property (the "stuff" you're arguing about in the contract, or that a party seeks to claim damages for in tort) in some way, and most property cases will involve a contract or tort.
Thrive wrote:
5) Why are we spending an entire class period talking about Coase Theorem?
Because Law and Economics is still huge in the academy, and many of your contracts professors probably were tenured as a result of some scholarship either defending or critiquing coase (although what coase meant to imply about private bargaining, pareto efficiency and transaction costs is not what a lot of people take the coase theorem to suggest). so yea expect to listen to some take on coase at least three times throughout 1L.
Its a useful heuristic for the origins of many legal rules: if individuals would contract to efficient outcomes on their own in the absence of transaction costs, consider: a lot of law/administration/governance must have then arose around market failure, where can law serve to correct inefficient outcomes, ect. Where are people failing to negotiate with themselves to pareto efficiency, and how can a common law rule help reduce a burdensome transaction cost or provide some other fix? You can then incorporate "higher order values" like assent/consent/ect and try to see how rules form to promote these values in an efficient way in our exchanges. Yea this stuff is largely bullshit but its the point profs try to make. Also see #4.
Thrive wrote:
6) Why do students focus on the minute details of each case? Whatever happened to the big picture?
See #2. What do you mean big picture. If you're in a class like contracts, yea the formalities and fragile terminology becomes important.. was it an offer? was it accepted? is this consideration? facts are dispositive. big picture is usually important for some policy point but as far as the exam is concerned, the bulk of your points will come from detailed and rigorous statutory analysis (i.e., a switch from active to passive voice or a comma placement) or intense "minute detail" fact analysis, while "big picture" political economy considerations will retain some value, but far less
Thrive wrote:
Do I just not get law school?
It's only been a month.. chill. I mean, to be totally honest, I know this is just a rant but it sounds like you might be a little lost, but far from incorrigibly so. Actually its totally normally to think a lot of this stuff and have these frustrations right now. By mid november, if you aren't seeing it come together for you, reach out again and there's a ton of educated commentary about 1L exams and law school on here.
