Los Sabados

Sleeping in till almost 10:00 a.m.
Cooking a three course brunch and eating it with my wife.
An afternoon in "Death Valley" at a Tiger Stadium football game.
An evening dinner and fellowship with friends, including talk of healing, The Silmarillion, and faraway places.
And playing a co-op campaign with a friend, scrambling for Covenant energy swords with which to slay fierce honor guards in the video game Halo 2.

That's what I love about Saturdays.
The one that just happened, anyway.

Rule #10

If after struggling with how a particular case fits into a certain test or theory yields repeated failed attempts at reconciliation, you are probably trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Example:
I struggled with Jenkins v. St. Paul for several weeks. This was the case that I actually woke up thinking about one morning. I literally, as the alarm went off, rolled over and started resuming my prior evening thoughts about the case. The case is one in which an attorney fails to file a client's underlying case within the prescriptive period, causing the client's case to "die," resulting in legal malpractice. The client sues the attorney for negligence. In order for the client to recover damages, the attorney's negligence has to be the actual cause of the client's harm. The client's harm is the failed lawsuit. Using the "but-for" actual causation test, the client recovers nothing. "But-for the attorney negligence, the harm still may have occurred because the client's underlying case was faulty." However, in the realm of actual causation, there is a second test, the "substantial factor" test, that may allow a showing of causation. Using substantial factor, if the negligent act and another force operate independently and either could have caused the harm, the negligent act can still be found to be a substantial factor in bringing about the harm, and thus be the "actual cause."

In Jenkins, my reasoning was that either of the 2 separate forces [(1) the client's underlying faulty suit and (2) the attorney's negligent malpractice] could have brought about the failed lawsuit, so the malpractice could be the actual cause. Yet, this case rejects that result and simply shifts the burden to the attorney to prove that the underlying case would have failed, even if he had filed the suit within the prescriptive period.

After trying to reconcile the substantial factor test with this result for weeks, I finally asked this question and Prof. Torts simply said, "I think you're over-analyzing this," and advised that Jenkins is an exception to the normal causation rules.

Exception. It's a dirty word, but one whose significance I apparently failed to realize.

Rule #9

9: Realize the underlying, inherent value in the several learning processes, not being distracted by their superficial, apparent value.

It makes the learning processes more effective.

9.1 Study Group - Actually, the apparent value is not even clear at this point, but if there is an apparent value, it is actually learning something new through group synergy. The real value, though, is just verbalizing the things one has been learning and becoming aware of things that one has learned but may not even be aware of.

9.2 Class - It's not about writing down everything the professor says. Maybe not even writing down much of it at all. Class is about learning to think like a lawyer. It's not necessarily about being vocal, either. Even if the professor is not asking you a question, answer the question presented in your own mind and see how your answer compares with the correct one.

9.3 Reading - Remembering every fact the court opinion presents is the fastest road to the Ecclesiastical "vanity of vanities." Rather, don't just see the court's answer to the legal issue, but see the underlying reasoning of how the judges got there: the statutory interpretation, the analogies included, the policy questions answered. Just "doing" the reading might have been okay to fool your elementary school teacher. And trying to remember every detail you read may have been okay when you actually used to read sci-fi novels recreationally. But that won't do you any good here.

9.4 Outlining - Perhaps, the biggest deception here is that the finished product, the outline itself, is important. Why outline when there are free outlines floating around? Sure, organization of one's notes into comprehendable form is praiseworthy. But the real value is that outlining forces a systematization and rationalization of concepts learned. In law school, knowing isolated and random facts will tend to do more harm than good. The only good comes from synthesis. You know it all, or you don't know anything at all. And outlining can literally give a law student something to live for. With little real and tangible output during the first semester, producing outlines can give one the satisfaction of seeing the product of the academic toil that undisputedly provides constant companionship for the first semester 1L.

LSU Law Classroom Moment of the Day

[The students all nod in response to a question asked by a professor.]

"All of you who are nodding your heads assertively, stop it."

Slow Down, Cool Off, the Law Thing Has Gotten a Little Out-of-Hand

At a soccer game last night, as I watched a player get bumped to the ground by another player, I instinctively yelled, "BATTERY!" and then mumbled to myself, "But there is a legal defense of consent." What was I even doing at a soccer game mid-week, anyway? I'm in law school!

The first thing on my mind this morning when I woke up one minute before the alarm went off was Jenkins v. St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance. On my mind in the sense that I immediately started thinking about the logic underlying the case.

Last night as I went to bed, I half-dreamily began seeing Prof. Civpro asking, "Now, what did the defendant do in or with the forum?" I confessed this to a classmate today, and he responded that that is a good thing. That probably means you'll do well on the exam, he suggested. That's not to mention the fact that I've fallen asleep muttering Latin phrases before.

Prof. Torts summed it up well today when someone in class complained something along the lines of, There aren't enough hours in the day to read all this junk, outline my notes, brief the cases, and come to class. Prof. Torts indicated that we're actually going to double the amount of pages we've been reading per night. With a smile, he intimated that we would have to make trade-offs and decide how to study, adding, "Welcome to law school."

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Don't worry. I'm not as wigged-out as this journal entry sounds. I just love dry humour.