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What would you say was the most difficult law topic in 1L for you to wrap your head around?

I'm thinking things like intent, commerce clause, consideration...I'm curious if there are any short list of topics people wish they could have spent more time on.

Rule against perpetuities /thread.

parol evidence "rule"

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acrossthelake wrote:Didn't take con law...probably something from con law if I took it.

No con law? Sounds TTT to me.

this has to be the trickier parts of Erie and Res Judicata/non-mutual offensive claim preclusion. Although PER is up there.

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I think a lot of this will depend on what your professors choose to emphasize. For example, we didn't even discuss the rule against perpetuities in Property (except to say that we weren't going to discuss it), but my professor loved estates and future interests, so we talked about all the rest of it.

Having said that, the hardest topic for me, by far, was the rules surrounding CCRs when there was no common plan. Who could enforce against whom, etc... Took me quite a while to grapple with all of that.

northerncali9 wrote:Rule against perpetuities /thread.

Not that difficult lil breh

I had a tough time mastering the intricacies of the Chevron doctrine in leg reg/administrative law. Also depending on the prof, estates and future interests can take a bit to get used to, but it's not that difficult conceptually really.

Some civ pro shit like Erie or Supplemental Jurisdiction or some of the weirder joinder rules and loopholes

Nothing is really conceptually "difficult." A more appropriate title would be "most obnoxiously unclear 1L topic." With that, I'll go with:

buckilaw wrote:parol evidence "rule"

Any topic where the professor wants to get into policy and philosophy. Those type of questions can be a real pain. Civ pro topics like Erie are not that difficult at all. You just have to understand the process.

Erie is not terrible, but certainly not fun in application. Rule against perpetuities' difficulty is overrated.

Probs future interests for me. Con law wasn't a difficult topic, but the mc for it was hard as fuck.

Rule against perpetuities; Vertical and Horizontal Privity.

Augmented estates, though only because we used a state-specific statute and quasi-math created by the professor to determine appropriate percentages of qualifies distributions from portions of the estate. What made it hard was that we were required to use the professor's equation, which didn't really work without tweaks to the formulas, and those that attempted to use their own (and still got to the right answer) were not given points (and, in at least one case, accused of cheating!)

That said, our prof's way of teaching RAP made it pretty easy (for our class, not for the real world.)

+1 to the parol evidence rule

I also had a lot of difficulty with personal jurisdiction. Not because it's hard to understand, but because every decision had a bunch of opinions with no majority and our prof wanted us to mention them all on the exam. It was hard for me to put it all in a neat and understandable framework.

bostonlawchick wrote:I also had a lot of difficulty with personal jurisdiction. Not because it's hard to understand, but because every decision had a bunch of opinions with no majority and our prof wanted us to mention them all on the exam. It was hard for me to put it all in a neat and understandable framework.

Given that we didn't discuss the rule against perpetuities and just scratched the surface of the parole evidence rule, the Erie doctrine, future interests, and one or two of the other notoriously annoying 1L topics, I'd have to go with the above, too, for much the same reasons. The "test," such as it is, is completely unclear: minimum contacts such that exercise of jurisdiction will not violate traditional notions of fair play and substantive justice. What the hell does that even mean? And then the stream of commerce controversies that follow (strict stream of commerce? purposeful availment? purposeful direction?) that have not been resolved yet by the Supreme Court just make it worse.

Glannon resolves a lot of the unclear aspects of the core doctrine, although there are still some things that are just blurry on the margins, because even the courts don't really know what to do.

class attendance.

tomwatts wrote:

bostonlawchick wrote:I also had a lot of difficulty with personal jurisdiction. Not because it's hard to understand, but because every decision had a bunch of opinions with no majority and our prof wanted us to mention them all on the exam. It was hard for me to put it all in a neat and understandable framework.

Given that we didn't discuss the rule against perpetuities and just scratched the surface of the parole evidence rule, the Erie doctrine, future interests, and one or two of the other notoriously annoying 1L topics, I'd have to go with the above, too, for much the same reasons. The "test," such as it is, is completely unclear: minimum contacts such that exercise of jurisdiction will not violate traditional notions of fair play and substantive justice. What the hell does that even mean? And then the stream of commerce controversies that follow (strict stream of commerce? purposeful availment? purposeful direction?) that have not been resolved yet by the Supreme Court just make it worse.

Glannon resolves a lot of the unclear aspects of the core doctrine, although there are still some things that are just blurry on the margins, because even the courts don't really know what to do.

I think though that the difference between something like that and RAP/parol evidence rule is that even though personal jx makes no sense and would be hard to figure out if you were asked to provide a yes/no answer, its not that bad on a law school exam. You just go run the balancing test and do the on the one had on the other style analysis and then say it could go either way. The problem with RAP is that there usually IS a right answer, the contingent interest is either valid or it isn't. Parol evidence is the same way, sometimes its ok, sometimes its not and the situations where that is the case are hard to remember, but its not a could go one way could go the other sort of thing.

It depends on your teachers in my opinion. I think Civ Pro I was the hardest. Not because it is a hard topic, but personal jurisdiction and all of that crap is just hard when you are in your first couple weeks of school.

chasgoose wrote: I think though that the difference between something like that and RAP/parol evidence rule is that even though personal jx makes no sense and would be hard to figure out if you were asked to provide a yes/no answer, its not that bad on a law school exam. You just go run the balancing test and do the on the one had on the other style analysis and then say it could go either way. The problem with RAP is that there usually IS a right answer, the contingent interest is either valid or it isn't. Parol evidence is the same way, sometimes its ok, sometimes its not and the situations where that is the case are hard to remember, but its not a could go one way could go the other sort of thing.

I dunno. Maybe it's because I don't have a liberal arts background like a lot of law students, but I find the stuff that has a definite yes or no answer much easier. We didn't do RAP in depth, but I had no real problem with it. Complex, yes, but not hard.

I feel like things like PJ are harder. I had a hell of a time with it on my exam and I'm hoping that doesn't kill me. The concept is easy to understand... the part I found difficult was bringing it all together into a coherent answer because there's the balancing test and then all the different stream of commerce theories, none of which have a majority, and trying to fit them all back together into a framework of traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice. Ugh... I swore to myself I would never type that phrase again, haha.

bostonlawchick wrote:

chasgoose wrote: I think though that the difference between something like that and RAP/parol evidence rule is that even though personal jx makes no sense and would be hard to figure out if you were asked to provide a yes/no answer, its not that bad on a law school exam. You just go run the balancing test and do the on the one had on the other style analysis and then say it could go either way. The problem with RAP is that there usually IS a right answer, the contingent interest is either valid or it isn't. Parol evidence is the same way, sometimes its ok, sometimes its not and the situations where that is the case are hard to remember, but its not a could go one way could go the other sort of thing.

I dunno. Maybe it's because I don't have a liberal arts background like a lot of law students, but I find the stuff that has a definite yes or no answer much easier. We didn't do RAP in depth, but I had no real problem with it. Complex, yes, but not hard.

I feel like things like PJ are harder. I had a hell of a time with it on my exam and I'm hoping that doesn't kill me. The concept is easy to understand... the part I found difficult was bringing it all together into a coherent answer because there's the balancing test and then all the different stream of commerce theories, none of which have a majority, and trying to fit them all back together into a framework of traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice. Ugh... I swore to myself I would never type that phrase again, haha.

LOL. Pretentious much?

bostonlawchick wrote:

chasgoose wrote: I think though that the difference between something like that and RAP/parol evidence rule is that even though personal jx makes no sense and would be hard to figure out if you were asked to provide a yes/no answer, its not that bad on a law school exam. You just go run the balancing test and do the on the one had on the other style analysis and then say it could go either way. The problem with RAP is that there usually IS a right answer, the contingent interest is either valid or it isn't. Parol evidence is the same way, sometimes its ok, sometimes its not and the situations where that is the case are hard to remember, but its not a could go one way could go the other sort of thing.

I dunno. Maybe it's because I don't have a liberal arts background like a lot of law students, but I find the stuff that has a definite yes or no answer much easier. We didn't do RAP in depth, but I had no real problem with it. Complex, yes, but not hard.

I feel like things like PJ are harder. I had a hell of a time with it on my exam and I'm hoping that doesn't kill me. The concept is easy to understand... the part I found difficult was bringing it all together into a coherent answer because there's the balancing test and then all the different stream of commerce theories, none of which have a majority, and trying to fit them all back together into a framework of traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice. Ugh... I swore to myself I would never type that phrase again, haha.

Yeah maybe I was just lucky that our Civ Pro professor didn't really care what conclusion we came to, just so that we engaged all the moving parts of the balancing test...Most of my answers ended with, well depending on how everything goes it could go either way. It probably would be this, but maybe not...