Reading Day 9

As I was taking the dog for a walk, I was thinking how nice it would be if when I got home I could have a nice relaxing Sunday evening. The last time I had a Sunday evening with nothing more to do than cook dinner, read a book, and relax was during spring break. I am pretty tired of studying, or maybe I am feeling exhausted because I know that a study free Sunday is only a week away. It is not that law school takes all that much time. I feel like I have more free time now than when I was working in restaurants, and when I am off now, I am not physically exhausted, so I actually have energy to do other things like ride my bike. What makes school so exhausting is that the work is never done. When you want free time you have to demand a space for it from the otherwise filled up schedule.

I worked through all of the rules, statutes, and cases that we have looked at this semester in civil procedure. I enjoyed the material on personal jurisdiction. Maybe because you can really see how common law works. The standard still used today for haling a defendant to court in a distant forum is the minimum contacts test laid out in International Shoe and its progeny. I love the way the courts say "and its progeny" as if the case were a sun surrounded by planets. Murcury would be the cases that most clearly exemplify the holding in International Shoe, whereas a case like Burger King Corp v. Rudzewicz would be somewhere around the Earth's orbit. There are minimum contacts, but there is also some debate, a dissent. When you get to the outer rim cases, the Neptune's, jurisdiction is barely there or maybe only in found to be present by the dissent such was the case in Helicopteros Nacionales de Colombia v. Hall. Of course there are cases that did not make it into the orbital sphere of International Shoe, but this cases surely did not find their way in the case book. For educational purposes, only the close call type of cases or the ones that present a new rule of law are really relevant.

We also studied the planetary sytem of cases surrounding the Erie doctrine and also several cases that dance around the idea of supplimental jurisdiction. These latter cases are orbiting systems around a statute that are held in place by the statutes gravatational pull of authority. The most recent of these was the Exxon Mobil /Rosario v. Star-Kist Foods, Inc case that was published last year and brough together the various standards floating around like stellar particles and formed them into a coherent ruling on the matter of supplimental jurisdiction. For me, it is easier to remember a rule if I can associate the rule with the facts of a specific case, and I think this is one of the main reasons that law school still teaches us the law by having us read cases. Even in areas where the law is governed primarily by statute, no one would want to go to law school or teach at one if learning was simply a matter of memorizing rules. Rules are developed from facts and are then re-applied to new facts. If I have learned anything this year, it is that the law is a continuous dialogue between rules and facts, each one affecting the other and dependent on the other for any coherent legal meaning. We study the facts of cases so we can learn the law and we learn the law so that we can apply it to new facts, and when no law can be rightly applied to a new set of facts, those facts can move through the legal system changing the law so that the law reflects what is the just outcome in a particular set of facts. This new law will then be applied to the subsequent facts that come into the courts, and on and on and on.