Law Lecture Quotes

Here is another great quote from Contracts class:

"Making a long term fixed price contract is like making an invitation to get sued."

There won't be many more opportunities to follow lectures for gems of legal humor, absurdity, and wisdom, because Wednesday is our last day of classes. I am actually all done with the reading for the semester and turned in my last memo yesterday. All that is left to do is to "bring it all together." I went back and re-read the first case that I read for my first class in law school, Bands Refuse Removal, Inc v. Bourough of Fair Lawn, 62 N.J.Super. 522 (1960), and although I did not have any big epiphanies from having come full circle, I definatly got more out of the case than I did on the first day, much more. I didn't even know that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure existed and know I can tell you pretty well what most of the rules are. I shouldn't get to excited and reflective yet, because we still have finals to get through, but it does help to see the way all of the law is connected. There are concepts in every case from Civil Procedure, and no substantive area of law is without its crossovers in the others. (Do you have the right on your own property to contract with another to commit a tort?) Bands Refues is an example of judicial power gone bad and I think the editors put it in the casebook first to show us newbies why the courts need rules. After a year of learning these rules, we finished on the the case Hanna v. Plumer, 380 U.S. 460 (1964), and we concluded the study of procedural rules with the words of Justice Warren: "the integrity of the Federal Rules is absolut." So we did go full circle. We need the rules and the rules are absolute. I realize I have completly oversimplified the internal procedural debates that exist in courts and legal scholarship, but this blog has always been about one students first experiences with the laws and I think I can say this: in order to have a functioning legal system there must be a system of rules, and you could complain, for example, that 30 days for filing an appeal is completely arbitrary and justice should not hang on a technicality, but to this I say that if you want to take advantage of the protections of the legal system, you also have to play by its rules. 30 days may be arbitrary, but it is not unfair (I am happily surprised to find the legal system pretty fair, albeit slow. Maybe it is slow because it is fair), and without someone setting the procedural rules, no justice could get handed down.

Back to studying my outlines. I'll be back. . . .