tie: Tax and Legal Accounting
Constitutional Law 1 and 2- full year course. I guess it could have been interesting with another professor, but for the life of me I could not figure the guy out. I squeaked by.
Commercial Transactions- the only good thing about this course was the first day I sat next to this smokin’ Cuban chick. We soon started hooking up and we’d write each other X-rated notes during class, then go to her apartment and act them out. No wonder I had a hard time keeping my mind on the UCC, negotiable paper, and what not.
A hideously boring subject, and oddly, one that I found myself weirdly talented at; Secured Transactions and Trial Advocacy were probably my most solid "A"s in all of law school.
I frankly can’t even remember what my least favorite class was called (something vaguely related to business entities), because it was so lame; I took an extra class to fill out some required summer hours, and it turned out to be a complete joke. The professor, a brand new adjunct, basically sat in front of us and read deposition transcripts for the whole class. Income Tax was a bachelor party compared to that.
Sounds to me like you were doing a practicum in negotiable paper! 
You, me, and ivn all went to the same law school.
It was just the stupid “Statutory Interpretation” thing that made me think he might have gone to the same one. It’s exactly what my school called it-I haven’t met anyone else that had it because UIUC didn’t teach normal Civ Pro I in the first year back then-they were teaching statutory interpretation + everyone else’s Civ Pro II.
That’s how they did it with us. Stat Interp (I took Fair Housing myself) in the first semester followed by a mandatory Civ Pro in the second that taught joinder, impleader, class action, etc., and nary a peep on jurisdiction (reserved for the optional Civ Pro II in your second or third year).
As I understand it, we were either the last or penultimate class to have this curriculum and the law school has reverted to a more conventional program.
Us neither (D.C.), although I took both. I liked pretty much all of it, but Crim Law was probably the most aggravating because the professor’s modest command of the English language. She could speak it fluently, and with a high degree of technical sophistication. But she couldn’t understand it – at least orally – with quite the same amount of sophistication. Leading the the repeated exercise of her asking a question, someone giving the right answer, her saying it was wrong, someone else giving the exact same answer in different words, her saying that was wrong, and then proceeding to present the exact same answer once again in her own words.
–Cliffy
Least favourite professor in law school? That would have to be the adjunct who was recovering from a head injury. To quote an assistant dean: “I’ll jump out of my office window if she returns.”
Business Organizations (corporations, partnerships and the like – this was before LLCs) was a mandatory second year class, taught by the most pedantic, boring, sawed off little piss ant you can imagine. The text and cases were bad enough but this little jerk in his three piece suit and flapping PBK key just made it all the worse. The class wasn’t especially difficult and the prof wasn’t scarey but the whole thing was a giant pain – plus it met at 2:00 in the afternoon when all I wanted to do was go home.
First year contracts, now that was scarey but it was also a right of passage – same with evidence.
And then there was always the occasional catastrophe. In the dark days of the first Johnson Administration Real Estate Transactions was a elective third year course. By that time almost all of us either had a job (contingent on passing the bar exam) or failing that had received a reporting date through the Draft Board and we were getting a little cocky. On a dreary late winter morning in 1967 we had this little exchange:
S.G.: But if yadda, yadda, parole evidence rule, statute of frauds, federal estate tax, general BS?
Prof: Mr Gelding if you had read the cases for today you would not ask that question.
S.G.: If I’d read the cases for to day I wouldn’t be here.
Prof.: This class is dismissed, except for you, Mr. Gelding.
It sort of went downhill from there. The professor, now the retired dean, and we still run into each other every once in a while. There is still a bit of tention.
Earlier, I named BizOrgs, which was my own most hated for the pathetic ratio of earnest effort/acheived results. The class itself was as interesting as it could be, the prof was once a stand up comic, actually.
However for sheer horrifying badness, the clear winner was my (required) course in Transnational Law, which was the bastard child of Choice of Law and International Law. The professor used this obnoxious k-8 pedagogy involving “organizer questions” and “summarizer questions” (the final turned out to be made up of 100% of these inane “questions for thought” and he who regurgitated most accurately, won. I think a “B” was like a 96%.) ANYHOO, She would also ONLY call on the people who obviously didn’t care, ignoring the people attempting to stir up a legitimate discussion in order to break up the dire boredom. The only way to get called on --even for a question! – was to make a show of obviously doing something non-class related, like loudly opening the paper, or answering a phone call. I pretty much wanted to stab myself in the face constantly.
I hated Torts, but it had more to do with the professor than the subject matter. The professor was of the opinion that no one should ever be able to sue for a loss that it was possible to insure against. Most of the class was spent on insurance theory. I think we did less than a week on intentional torts, because he didn’t find any of them interesting.
Thank god for Bar/bri.
That’s a week more than we spent on intentional torts. Quoth my professor “You’ll learn them for the Bar.” And she was right!
–Cliffy
Wow. That made me uncomfortable just reading it.
Maybe we could share dramatic flame-out stories. I remember one guy getting beat up on some esoteric point in Chimel v. California that hinged on Carroll v. US, and after about the sixth iteration of “No, Mr. Adusky…” the guy stood up and said, “Fuck Chimel, fuck California, and fuck you,” and then stormed out.
Yeah, we didn’t see him again.
I killed the thread.
Wow. No other flame out stories, eh?
I may have mentioned this before, but once more can’t hurt. It occurred during our exam in first-year contracts. About a half-hour into the exam, one of my classmates got up, handed in his paper, and left. Huh? He couldn’t be finished in that amount of time. We later learned that he had spent the half-hour drawing a (very good, so I was told) winter landscape in his answer book.
Oddly, he did return to school. Apparently, it took many meetings with the Dean and the Contracts prof, and I’m not sure exactly how it was done or what was agreed to, but he did return. He worked hard after that, and actually managed to graduate. It may not have been a flame-out on par with yours, Bricker, but I’d say it was noteworthy anyway.
Oh my word, (US Federal) Administrative Law. What a collosal, pointless waste of time. I could have learned everything I needed in that class in four hours, not twelve weeks.
None at my school, unless you count some interesting rants by the sessional adjunct with the frontal lobe injury.
The thing that leapt to mind on reading the thread title was Civ Pro, and I see I’m not alone. I agree, it’s just damn hard to teach out of a book. A practical class would have been much better.
But perhaps I should choose Criminal Procedure II, which I believe I skipped at least 60% of (I was probably at the height of my depression that year and likely should have been hospitalized).
Torts was fun though. There, I learned of the two most dangerous items on Earth: trains and haystacks.