Nature of the Bargain

Starting to think like a lawyer - strike that - starting to think like a law student:

The other night my boy was discussing his fantasy baseball league with me. He was trying to decide whether to make a trade. I found myself thinking, "But what is the heart of the bargain? They're bargaining about whose knowledge and predictions of the players are better. This is like the Peerless case, where they were bargaining over who could better predict the price of cotton over time."

I usually restrain myself from brining my Contracts class into conversations with my boy, but I did share this one. It's a sort of implicit bargain, that he won't bore me with baseball talk, and I won't bore him with law school talk. But as we were both in breach...

Class Action Myspacers

I did this on Myspace, but maybe it really belongs here.

Types of myspace users, in accordance with the requirements for a Class Action lawsuit:

1. Numerosity: These myspacers don't care who their friends are, they just want to get as many as possible, and more than you. They'll befriend anyone who asks. They hunt down random bands to inflate their numbers. These are the people with more than 400 friends.

2. Commonality: These myspacers have friends who all have one thing in common, and it's attractiveness. These are the myspacers whose top 8 is comprised entirely of hot girls in provacative poses.

3. Typicality: These myspacers only collect friends who are their friends in Real Life. Accordingly, they have under 100 myspace friends. They consistently decline to approve random guys who hit on them with friend requests. Their myspace friends are the same type as their RL friends.

4. Representation: These are the myspacers who got talked into getting a myspace account, but who make no effort to collect friends or update their profile. You recognize these because their profile only inform you that they're a Sagitarius, and they have no photo. They might have only one friend, Tom. They are only minimally represented as a ghostlike silhouette.

Point system

In San Francisco there's always somebody striking or threatening to strike. Activism, empowerment, all the time.

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Today was a big day for me - I got 25 points in Crim Pro. You get points for answering hard questions. They don't mean anything of course - as Shatz always informs the visiting prospectives. Someobody else got the other 25 (he split it) but I knew the answer before she added her bit. (The answer was "TLO," the name of a case we covered.) I'd feel even more psyched, but it was a pretty easy question, not a 50 point question. Maybe a 10 pointer. But he was working hard to motivate us because we have this Moot Court brief due, and nobody was prepared for class. And I think he likes to impress the guests with it; it's good showmanship, because he gets to make the announcement that points are meaningless. It was sorta funny the first time he said it.

My dad used to give points out when I was little. Like when we were traveling, "Whoever sees the ocean first gets 100 points!" But our points weren't meaningless. If you got a billion, you got a Ferrari.

Update on Holmes

Update on the Holmes quote:
Some legal pundits have suggested that intent should be removed from Contract law, making it into a sports-like "foul or no foul" standard. However, as Holmes suggested, intent plays a big role in the context of a contract, and "even a dog knows the difference..."

Being kicked

Why is it that people are impressed when you say you're a law student...but when somebody says they're a lawyer, they get the evil eye?

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I dig this quote from my Contracts casebook:

“As Holmes once observed, even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.”

I wish I could elucidate the context, but my brain was too tired to wrap around it. It was in the defenses section, regarding rescission of a contract for legal impossibility versus legal impractibility.

Use it or lose it

People are always turning on the lights around me when I read. Inevitably, they say, "You're gonna ruin your eyes, readin in the dark like that!"

Is there any scientific basis for this theory? The rest of your body is systematically slapped with the use-it-or-lose-it theory. Muscles, that makes sense, because we see them get bigger or smaller in proportion to our gym visits. Your heart needs to get worked out too - but then it is a muscle. Other organs kinda fit too though - if you don't eat a lot, your stomach shrinks. There's all this evidence out lately that one way to prevent/lessen the effects of Alzheimer's is to stay mentally active (they always mention crossword puzzles). Use it or lose it. Your brain is a bunch of neurons. Your eyeball, now that has a lot of neurons too. Who's to say that reading in faint light isn't actually good for your eyes? [Wait, do I have that wrong or is that just a weird saying: "who's to say." What the hell does that mean? Who would say? Who can say?]

Anyway, until somebody can point me to at least a quasi-scientific study proving it, I'm not gonna be bothered by reading in low light.

Me at Monterey Bay Aquarium

 

Not shopping

For some reason all my profs have this idea that we go on the internet during class to do one thing, and one thing only: search eBay. I don't know where they got this idea, because most of us are quick enough on the upshot to close the window when they start wandering up the aisles. And as I sit in class, by far the most popular entertainment I see on laptops remain Solitaire and IM. Usually they come as a pair. Then email, a smattering of CNN. Lately I've seen a lot of people doing Lexis trivia. Every time I see somebody doing it, I try and keep an eye on them to cheat on the day's answer, but I always miss it. They probably randomize those anyway.

So I don't know why they think we're on eBay. Most of my profs seem to be level 3 on the internet savviness scale - meaning they can check email but can't figure out how to make the electronic projector screen retract. But I mean, where would we get the money to shop that often?