Thursdays are Contracts days, and for an 8:30am class Professor Contracts keeps the energy level high. But today stole the show.
We’re going over additional and different terms in contracts, and differences between the common law and the Uniform Commercial Code. UCC §2-207 governs those additional terms when the UCC applies to a transaction, and Professor Contracts noted there are 2 different 2-step processes to figure out how those additional terms should be treated: check §2-207(1) to figure out if you have a contract by forms and if so go to §2-207(2) for the additional terms, or check §2-204 if you have a contract by conduct, then go to §2-207(3) for the additional terms.
Fairly simple concept.
But to make extra certain everyone in the class got it down cold, Professor Contracts fired up this video mid-PowerPoint:
And yes, the rumors are true — he even danced a bit
Envision for a minute that you’re watching television.
A Pay-Per-View channel specifically.
And not just any Pay-Per-View channel, but one with shows that are kind of a blend between a UFC match and the movie Gladiator.
Where the bad guy is a robot, wielding a 500ish-page Torts textbook in one hand and a 500ish-page Contracts textbook in the other, trying to bludgeon its opponent to death, and the only way to stop it is to utter the right combination of cryptic phrases like “shopkeeper’s privilege” and “sua sponte” and “offer / acceptance / consideration / mutual assent”.
And the hero dies in the end.
That’s a rough approximation of how I envisioned the Socratic method of teaching law. Fortunately it hasn’t turned out nearly that bad — no one’s died so far as I know — but as I mentioned yesterday I’m a little worried I’ve become a marked man.
It all started this past Monday in Torts. Remember a couple Fridays ago when I volunteered to go over Pearson v. Dodd, flubbed my response, and Professor Torts noted with a Cheshire Cat smile that she’d be “coming back to [me] very soon”? Yeah, that was Monday.
We’re going over defenses to intentional torts, and the case being reviewed was Bonkowski v. Arlan’s Department Store (12 Mich. App. 88). Unlike my last crash-and-burn experience, though, this time I just knew I had outmaneuvered Professor Torts! Figuring she’d call me at some point in the week, I not only (i) had hand-written case notes but (ii) instantly pulled up my typed case brief on my laptop and (iii) flipped to the well-highlighted pages in my textbook. I was going to nail these questions.
I went over the case summary without a hitch. Answered the first couple questions without a hitch. Then got asked why the Court brought in the Montgomery Ward case for comparison (Montgomery Ward & Co v. Freeman, 199 F2d 720), and… splat.
There were/are essentially 3 “take-home points” from Bonkowski as far as defense goes: validating the shopkeeper’s privilege, a distinction regarding the length of time a customer is detained, and a distinction regarding where the customer is located at the time the shopkeeper attempts to detain them. I had all 3 points written down with corresponding notes, but never put in my notes the source documents the Court was comparing against with each (the Restatement (Second) of Torts, the Montgomery Ward case, and the R2T again, respectively).
So after making it through shopkeeper’s privilege and getting the M. Ward question, I realized the shortcoming in my notes, mentally freaked, couldn’t find the right passage in the textbook quickly enough, figured I had a 50-50 shot at guessing 1 of the 2 remaining points I wrote down, and picked the distinction re location (aka the wrong answer). The Professor gives me the raised eyebrow that says “You’re totally wrong and trying to BS me.” I notice, then promptly correct myself by referencing the timeframe of detainment. The Professor confirms but notes that “Whenever the Court is bringing in another case, you need to make sure you understand why the Court is bringing in the case” (“Yes ma’am.”). Now I’m thinking I’m in the clear… when she asks what other take-home points, if any, I found.
In my mind I’m thinking I already brought up the location issue so that covered the 3 issues and there shouldn’t be anything else. But since the location issue was the wrong answer at the time I brought it up, I found out after class that the Professor was expecting me to repeat it at the appropriate time… and instead I had said I didn’t have any other points. Which prompted a less-than-happy string of commentary to the class that we’re clearly not reading the material and if we don’t stop playing around with her and the course we’d regret it by midterms.
Professor Torts: 2. TDot: 0.
And like the last time someone flubbed a response that indicated they hadn’t read, who was the first person to get called on the next day in Contracts? Yours truly.
Not only was I the first person called, but I felt like I hadn’t even been attending the class because the questions asked didn’t line up at all with the notes I had written down. By the time my 5 minutes worth of fumbling for answers was finished, it was pretty well-cemented in my mind that I need to do a better job picking the salient points to jot down in my notes…
Anyhow, hopefully I’ll at least have a reprieve for the next few classes I’ve been spared recent humiliation both in Property and in CivPro — though in the search logs for law:/dev/null I noticed 2 separate visitors who came here yesterday after searches for Mean Dean Green, so I might be on the hit list now for that class too (Prof Green, if you happen to read this: the entire Gang of Eight, myself included, thinks you’re a phenomenal teacher. And I had nothing at all to do with the nickname. Don’t kill me plz.)
Hope all of you are having a great week so far! Have a good night everybody!!
At the end of last week I mailed just over half of my Fall financial aid refund to my grandparents, both of whom are retired. It was the responsible “good grandson” thing to do, and the warm fuzzies you get from doing something positive are more than worth the cost… but I still had a minor heart attack when an entire digit dropped off the length of my bank account balance and I had forgotten why
On the upside it forced me to resume paying closer attention to where I’m spending my $$.
We all know living on a tight budget is a reality of student life, especially in law school when you’re actually not allowed to work more than 20 hours a week (and if you even work that much you’ll likely FUBAR your 1L academic record). That makes law school a perfect time to learn to cook
In looking at my last few grocery receipts, I can eat pretty doggone well on $100 or less a month depending on what kind of coupons / specials / etc I can score. That’s less than $3.50 a day for 3 meals, snacks, and an obligatory dessert before bed (a bad habit I acquired as a kid).
You also get a better variety than your typical student diet. Eggs or bacon or sausage or french toast or waffles or cereal for breakfast (or something else of course). Steak, spaghetti, pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, bbq chicken, pork chops, beef stew, etc etc etc for lunch or dinner. Salad to be “healthy”, Goldfish or Doritos to be not-so-much. Milk, orange juice, and multiple flavors of Kool-Aid to wash it down. And a couple gallon tubs of ice cream
That’s just my own kitchen of course — the great thing about learning to cook is that it’s like learning to ride a bike: it’s ridiculously easy, and once you’ve got it down it opens up a whole range of new possibilities (plus it’s cost efficient and you never really forget how to do it).
And if you’re a guy, you get the added bonus of having a skill that guys apparently aren’t supposed to have unless they star in their own show on the Food Network
That’s my snippet of wisdom for the day — have to be ready for PT at 0630 so I’m heading to bed. For another culinary money-saving tip, check out Jansen’s post today also. Have a good night folks!
Maybe it was my 1L naïveté. Or my ridiculously oversized ego. Or just the fact sending and receiving several thousand text messages in a month isn’t that unusual for me. But I thought I could handle the law school “bubble”… and instead it’s starting to handle me. Grrr.
It all started with me trolling through the new blawg posts online (I <3 Safari’s Top Sites feature for this ) and reading this entry over at Fearfully Optimistic. Although I don’t constantly hit the refresh button on my RSS feed — and actually never learned how to use an RSS reader until I started law:/dev/null and saw how much RSS feeds impact readership — my own procrastination vice is texting. Hands down.
But I hadn’t really seen it as much of a vice up to this point. Texting lets me stay in touch with people regularly, and between spending years as a Comp Sci undergrad and having a full QWERTY keyboard on the BlackBerry I can actually text about as fast as I can type (110wpm on a keyboard, somewhere north of 80wpm on the BlackBerry).
With my phone firmly in hand, I was going to beat the law school bubble. Yes I had a ton of reading, but what’s a sporadic message here and there? Sure I needed to brief those cases, but can a quick 10-text exchange really be that bad? And I know that outline probably needs to be updated, but omg did you hear about what happened after the football game?! (We trounced Murray State btw, 65-0 )
Then I spent most of today split between filling out paperwork for a security clearance (every snippet of my life for the past 10 years?? shootmeplzkthx) and reading for CivPro and Torts tomorrow… and noticed how bonkers my phone drives me at times.
Never saw the movie, but I'm guessing it was about law school...
There were 50+ messages between one of my friends and I, with at least 1 every hour starting at 1pm. There were 75+ between myself and another friend, with at least 1 every hour starting at 9am. And there were at least 100+ back and forth messages with a 3rd friend over BlackBerry Messenger, which I stopped counting because it’s so much like AIM in that it’s ridiculously easy to send someone the slightest thought of even marginal significance that it can’t even really qualify as conversation.
At this point you’re probably thinking “Just cut off the damn phone.” And you’re right, I should. But I’m always paranoid the one time I decide to cut the phone completely off will be the one moment a friend’s in a car accident or drunk out of their mind needing a DD or in the hospital with acute appendicitis or something.
So then I set the phone to only go off when there’s an actual call — just for me to respond like Pavlov’s dog and habitually check to see if someone’s texted me but I missed it because the ringer was off.
Recognizing my addiction prompts me to make myself less available, force myself not to respond to texts, be “that guy we used to call a friend who’s now still a friend technically I guess but is really better friends with his law books and has no life because he’s always doing homework and reading and being all law-like” (actual quote)…
…and then realize I’ve essentially ended up as the one thing I tried to avoid. Ugh.
Hope all of you had a good weekend, and have a good night!
Nothing to really write about today. I stayed up late last night watching the Tale of Despereaux — every now and then everyone should take a break from the seriousness of life to enjoy a kid’s movie — then slept in late this morning, got some work done after I got up, headed down to Raleigh to tailgate with friends and watched the Wolfpack of N.C. State University demolish the Murray State Racers (65-7 final score). Just got home about 30 minutes ago to resume studying Torts and CivPro…
…and part of me wishes I was still drunk. Currently on recovery of property in Torts, and I honestly don’t know at the moment where we are in Civil Procedure. I’ll have to check my notes in the morning.
For a guy who didn’t have his first alcoholic beverage until he was 25, I feel like I’m going to be a certified alcoholic by the time law school is over…
The original draft I had of today’s post was longer, more detailed, and probably better written. But it seemed shallow to the extreme writing about my own experience 8 years ago when so many others were impacted far more significantly.
So I’ll leave it at this: while I can’t guarantee as others have that I will never forget, I certainly haven’t yet forgotten. You’re in my prayers.
There are a few reasons why I wasn’t surprised or upset: above all I didn’t earn the victory (my opponents campaigned harder than I did); I think both of the winners are competent and will do a great job; and I have a habit of failing first-time campaigns, losing races at NC State both pre-dropout and post-return.1
The problem is that creating a fictitious pecking order in law school ignores a fundamental reality of human life — everyone’s better at something than someone else.
Take the Gang of Eight as an example. Without going through everyone in total detail, in our group we’ve got a former Student Body President, a member of the armed services, a musician, and a business owner. Multiple people have multiple degrees apiece. Several of them play several sports. And as far as I know all of them had a higher college GPA than I did.
So who are the “big fish” in the group? It depends. If you need to lobby a politician, talk to DMoff for tips. Write a love song? Rockstar’s your guy. Can’t fix your broken Microsoft Windows installation? My CSC degree and I will be glad to help you (or you could just do us both a favor and buy a Mac ).
And remember we’re just 8 people out of a 1L class of nearly 200. That’s not even getting into the academic über-achievers, and the different subjects where each of them will have their own respective strengths.
I consider myself fortunate that the North Carolina Central University School of Law doesn’t seem to have the “gunner” types you constantly hear about at places like LSD. But even if we did, those types of folks inevitably lose out to everyone else because they have a fundamentally wrong zero-sum view of the world. There are a *lot* of different skills and experiences that carry weight out in the “real world,” and no one will ever significantly outperform everyone else on more than a couple of them at most.
And if anyone significantly underperformed everyone else on those same metrics, odds are they’re not in law school.
So instead of stressing about my class rank or fuming over an election loss, I’d much rather support my classmates and enjoy being in the presence of people who do things better than I do.
Besides, I know I’m usually the first one they’ll call when their computers gets hit by the latest virus Have a great night everybody!
In the post-return case, being the 4th place finisher in a 3-seat Student Senate race — losing to a guy who didn’t even campaign. And who, ironically, had become one of my best friends and biggest supporters when I ran for Student Senate President the next year. [↩]
One of my classmates in undergrad was a British exchange student, and he seemed to derive great pleasure in referring to me as a “queer bird” whenever we talked about politics (you have to imagine it being said in a thick British accent for full effect).
I’m a registered Republican, once-upon-a-time the youngest elected Vice Chairman in the history of the Wake County GOP… only to get thrown out of the party by the same folks 2 years later for being “too liberal,” then spending most of the years since electing / working for / working with Democrats with whom I agree on almost nothing.1 My political views would generally be considered libertarian — quasi-neocon on taxes, firearms and national defense, with a “leave me the @#$% alone” philosophy on social issues like gay marriage and abortion — but unlike most big-L Libertarians I’m totally comfortable with the government taking on certain obligations (e.g. education) and even have a positive opinion of most government agencies like the US Postal Service.
And, as irony would have it, the IRS.
It’s not that I particularly like them, but I recognize the jobs they do are necessary for any complex, functional nation-state. And — having worked for a handful of state agencies myself — I know most of the positions are filled by individuals who are individually rational and competent, even if the bureaucratic mosaic they compose lends itself to some of the most profound idiocy imaginable.
So today really shouldn’t have been a surprise to me. But oohhhh it was…
Let me first give you some background on me. I’ve mentioned in a coupleposts already that I’m a former college dropout: I started as a freshman at N.C. State University in August 1998 and by June 2000 was essentially thrown out because I couldn’t pay off my bill.2
So there I am at 19, a bundle of freshly minted fail, loading trucks from 3am-8am at UPS to make ends meet. I eventually get a low-paying gig as a file clerk at a law firm, which leads to a slightly less low-paying gig as a paralegal, and so on. Over the next few years I compile a pretty banging résumé and some crazy war stories, but realize I make a laughable salary, my life isn’t really going anywhere sans college degree, and I’m basically just treading water.
But I owe N.C. State $16K+ before they’ll let me re-enroll.
Determined not to waste my life doing nothing, I decide to take a gamble: I intentionally underpay my income taxes for the FY2003 and FY2004 tax years, and offer up the money “saved” as a down payment to N.C. State to convince them to let me pay off the balance in $550/mo increments from when I came back until I graduated. I still filled out my tax returns fully and on time, and expected to pay the taxes owed along with the applicable penalties and interest once I had a degree and started making real money — even with those penalties and interest, a few thousand dollars is nothing insurmountable.
In one of those res ipsa loquitur moments of my life, the plan worked. I came back to NC State in August 2005, had the full $16K I owed them paid off just over a year later,3 set up a payment plan with the IRS to repay the back taxes, and graduated this past June with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science before heading off to the North Carolina Central University School of Law. Things seemed to be going pretty doggone well compared to only a few years prior when I was working 60+ hour weeks between 2 jobs for a paycheck that barely covered the bills.
Fast forward to last Monday when I missed my classes. I not only owe the IRS $0.00, but have ample documentation that I owe them $0.00 because I’m a packrat and generally don’t throw away financial records (I’ve even got bank statements from my first savings account my grandmother opened for me in the early 1990s. I’m that bad.). I check my PO Box in Raleigh — the staff there being one of the main reasons I like the Postal Service — and see a notice that the IRS is going to levy my bank account for $611.51. I drive in-person to the IRS office in Durham to get the situation handled… only to find the office inexplicably closed until 1pm when its posted hours are 8am-5pm Monday-Friday.
So after missing Civil Procedure and spending the afternoon killing time, I go back around 12:30pm where a line is starting to queue up. The office opens with an impressive -1- employee working in a space roughly the size of a few law school classrooms stacked together. I wait about 2 hours before getting seen. Explain my situation. Get a cordial response. The IRS agent is understanding and gives me 2 copies of a Form 668-D indicating the levy is released, telling me to keep a copy for myself and give the other to my bank. I then drive straight to my local branch, see a customer service rep there, hand them the levy release, and they mail it off to the bank’s legal order processing folks in New York.
This is all 2 Mondays ago. August 31st. So I log into my account today to find… a $611.51 tax levy debited, with an extra $100.00 “legal processing fee” thrown in for the hell of it.
I call the bank, who tells me to call the IRS.
I call the IRS, who tells me to call the bank.
I call a different person at the bank, who forwards me to a 3rd person’s voicemail because she has no clue wtf is going on. I’m sufficiently pissed off at this point that my ears burn and my face looks like a tomato.
After Torts, I drive in-person to the bank branch and politely ask them to contact the legal processing folks in New York to figure out the situation. The people in NY have no record of the levy release, even though they got other mail from that same branch office mailed that same day. Why no record of the release? Because the IRS sent them the levy notice Friday 09/04/09 — aka an entire workweek after my in-person meeting with them — so when the bank’s people would have received my little piece of mail some time around the Wednesday or Thursday prior, there was no levy in their system for the release to affect.
I’ll sidestep my annoyance at the bank — yeah they should probably have done a better job at data entry, but they’ve been good to me on a host of issues for years now (including a crazy identity theft incident that turned into a total cluster@#$%). But the IRS… the glorious and amazing IRS… somehow sent an erroneous levy notice days after the branch office gave me a release and documented in their little national database that I owed $0.00.
I could understand a screw-up of this magnitude back in the era when everything was documented on ledger sheets and networked computers didn’t exist. But if I can access an account by my Social Security Number on IRS.gov, there’s no reason for less-than-realtime updates from a branch office — and at the very least that same branch office providing a release form should tip off whatever office is issuing levies that… well… there’s no grounds for the levy.
So now I get to wait 48 hours or so for the bank to credit my account the $611.51 the government essentially stole from me, and will likely have to fill out an IRS Form 8546 to get reimbursed at some point for the bank’s $100.00 legal order processing fee caused by the government’s incompetence. Not to mention the hours wasted on the phone and in person trying to get things fixed when I probably should have been studying CivPro.
And bear in mind I’m pretty damn lucky in this situation — my tuition refund covers my expenses for the entire semester, so I can afford to be short $700 for a couple months. Imagine if I was regular taxpayer providing for a family and living paycheck-to-paycheck…
Anyhow, sorry for the rant. I had some legit law-related stuff to blog about but really just needed to get that off my chest. Back to normal posting tomorrow
Have a great night everybody!
Political types refer to it as “seeking retribution” [↩]
The whole situation was a *lot* more convoluted and wtf-able than that, but I need a few drinks to retell it with adequate exasperation [↩]
Thanks to my already impoverished grandparents moving heaven and Earth to make sure I graduated — I <3 you Nan and Pops!! [↩]
Good night folks! 
