Torts, which is to say the things in civil law that will get your ass sued, but aren’t contracts. Mostly your basic personal injury stuff.
My Torts professor was a local legend, and basically left the teaching of the subject to an obsolete version of a non-mandatory text. He never asked about it, and he never built his exams around it, and only occasionally mentioned the damn thing. Instead, his exams were mostly based on recitations of facts from cases and he especially delighted in including questions based on his “tangents” in lectures, well practiced over decades of southern-fried paper-chase nonsense. I was told this about the exams, and took the second years at their word. Several old exams were also freely available for review in the law library. I spent the entire year terrified and confused, holding on for dear life to remember enough to pass. I guess I did okay, getting a B on the midterm and a C (C-minus? I honestly don’t remember) overall in the class. Since it was graded on a curve, I was clearly not alone in how I approached the material, though in retrospect actually knowing anything about torts would have helped too.
It was two years later, almost time to graduate, that I was having discussions with classmates and realized, “Holy shit! Torts have elements!” That is to say, there are actions and criteria that have to be satisfied: e.g., there must be (1) an action X taken with (2) mindset Y, that (3) results in damages Z, (4) ameliorated by concept AA or defense AB. Things get squishier around the edges than criminal law, but it’s basically the exact same analytical framework as that, a course that I (relatively speaking) enjoyed and did much better in. I mean, I guess I knew what most of the relevant concepts were, but the idea that they fit together in a logical way, not just as a mush of “whatever wins the case” was an epiphany.
Now, to be fair, if I’d done all the things that a properly motivated and earnest legal scholar is supposed to do, like heeding the cliched guidance to study two hours for every hour of class, to do all recommended reading, and to avail myself of office hours, I likely could have figured this out much earlier, but it happened how it happened, and in my defense, none of my other professors thought themselves too important and too bored to share the basic underpinnings of their subjects with their first-year students.
The one teaching Contracts totally fucked that second-year who rode a motorcycle, though.
College is about maximizing the knowledge given to you to yield the results you desire. There is no fucking way to read every text and study every single thing to a certainty of knowledge.
Some things are a cursory once over so IF it comes up later you know where to look. But a lot of it is just tangents. But testing you on tangents not in the text or study guides? Man. You had it rough.
American law schools are their own strange subculture of the education world, graduate school but not really research degrees (though a species of research is in some ways the heart of the exercise), professional schools but full of stuffy academics, and deeply, weirdly hierarchical and full of completely unearned egos. There are very few Richard Feynmans even in the finest law schools.
No one is (generally) allowed to represent clients without passing the Bar Exam, so professors feel emboldened to indulge their own personal quirks, whether that’s psychologically attempting to weed people out or simply washing their hands of any responsibility for their students’ success whatsoever.
I didn’t actually dislike the guy (he really was quite the character), but it’s fair to say that his idiosyncratic method of teaching didn’t resonate with me. After a rather stressful first semester of trying to play the game exactly so, I was doing okay, but as it went on I realized that the reward for spending all your time and doing well in law school is stuff that basically makes law school never end (big commercial jobs with 2000+ billable hours, judicial clerkships, etc.), and that LAW SCHOOL SUCKS. My GPA is thus like a modestly sloped roller coaster, going up at the start and fading for the rest of the ride, finally leveling out when I took my last semester pass/fail as a visiting student to make my long-distance relationship not long-distance.
I think mine was up and down too. I am not a lawyer and only have an undergraduate degree. However I have def had the professor that did not resonate with me. I can think of at least two that just did not work as intended. Luckily I passed both classes. But it was only because I figured out how to pass their class. Not because I took away a massive amount of applicable knowledge.
Torts, which is to say the things in civil law that will get your ass sued, but aren’t contracts. Mostly your basic personal injury stuff.
My Torts professor was a local legend, and basically left the teaching of the subject to an obsolete version of a non-mandatory text. He never asked about it, and he never built his exams around it, and only occasionally mentioned the damn thing. Instead, his exams were mostly based on recitations of facts from cases and he especially delighted in including questions based on his “tangents” in lectures, well practiced over decades of southern-fried paper-chase nonsense. I was told this about the exams, and took the second years at their word. Several old exams were also freely available for review in the law library. I spent the entire year terrified and confused, holding on for dear life to remember enough to pass. I guess I did okay, getting a B on the midterm and a C (C-minus? I honestly don’t remember) overall in the class. Since it was graded on a curve, I was clearly not alone in how I approached the material, though in retrospect actually knowing anything about torts would have helped too.
It was two years later, almost time to graduate, that I was having discussions with classmates and realized, “Holy shit! Torts have elements!” That is to say, there are actions and criteria that have to be satisfied: e.g., there must be (1) an action X taken with (2) mindset Y, that (3) results in damages Z, (4) ameliorated by concept AA or defense AB. Things get squishier around the edges than criminal law, but it’s basically the exact same analytical framework as that, a course that I (relatively speaking) enjoyed and did much better in. I mean, I guess I knew what most of the relevant concepts were, but the idea that they fit together in a logical way, not just as a mush of “whatever wins the case” was an epiphany.
Now, to be fair, if I’d done all the things that a properly motivated and earnest legal scholar is supposed to do, like heeding the cliched guidance to study two hours for every hour of class, to do all recommended reading, and to avail myself of office hours, I likely could have figured this out much earlier, but it happened how it happened, and in my defense, none of my other professors thought themselves too important and too bored to share the basic underpinnings of their subjects with their first-year students.
The one teaching Contracts totally fucked that second-year who rode a motorcycle, though.
College is about maximizing the knowledge given to you to yield the results you desire. There is no fucking way to read every text and study every single thing to a certainty of knowledge.
Some things are a cursory once over so IF it comes up later you know where to look. But a lot of it is just tangents. But testing you on tangents not in the text or study guides? Man. You had it rough.
American law schools are their own strange subculture of the education world, graduate school but not really research degrees (though a species of research is in some ways the heart of the exercise), professional schools but full of stuffy academics, and deeply, weirdly hierarchical and full of completely unearned egos. There are very few Richard Feynmans even in the finest law schools.
No one is (generally) allowed to represent clients without passing the Bar Exam, so professors feel emboldened to indulge their own personal quirks, whether that’s psychologically attempting to weed people out or simply washing their hands of any responsibility for their students’ success whatsoever.
I didn’t actually dislike the guy (he really was quite the character), but it’s fair to say that his idiosyncratic method of teaching didn’t resonate with me. After a rather stressful first semester of trying to play the game exactly so, I was doing okay, but as it went on I realized that the reward for spending all your time and doing well in law school is stuff that basically makes law school never end (big commercial jobs with 2000+ billable hours, judicial clerkships, etc.), and that LAW SCHOOL SUCKS. My GPA is thus like a modestly sloped roller coaster, going up at the start and fading for the rest of the ride, finally leveling out when I took my last semester pass/fail as a visiting student to make my long-distance relationship not long-distance.
I think mine was up and down too. I am not a lawyer and only have an undergraduate degree. However I have def had the professor that did not resonate with me. I can think of at least two that just did not work as intended. Luckily I passed both classes. But it was only because I figured out how to pass their class. Not because I took away a massive amount of applicable knowledge.