2+2="It Depends"

Contracts class continues to be a 50 minute session of anxiety-driven, sweaty, anticipatory fear-of-being-called-on-and-thereby-humiliated class period. In any other class I think you could argue that normal preparation and a personal opinion will get you to the answers. In contracts, regular preparation is viewed as a breach of duty and malpractice; a lack of “thinking” is shameful; and admitting a lack of preparation will earn public mocking by the professor. All I can do is what I've been doing and constantly I still feel totally inadequate. I hope it starts to gel.

Torts is fun. Though there are nuances to the subject that are not too easy to digest. For every case, there is a set of factors that builds upon a previous set of factors or elements that enables the courts to screw someone over, be it the plaintiff or defendant. I’m not saying that justice isn’t brought about, I’m just saying that for every situation, there seems to be some rational way to justify one ruling or another, depending on how the court sees the situation from a policy perspective. 

For instance, if you are injured negligently, you can sue the party that injured you for negligence, as long as you can prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the injuring party negligently breached a duty of care. What that duty of care is, depends on several factors. What about if there is more than one defendant? Oh, then you have to determine if they’re jointly liable (acted in concert), severally liable (acted independently), or joint and severally liable, and how to apportion their liability depending on the extent of the injury that each party is responsible for. To do that, there are lots of factors and elements and rules to follow or prove or exceptions to look for or whatever. It’s all very simple, but it’s also very complicated. 

The law, it seems, is just as varied as the fact patterns of each case. Which means that the judicial process, by necessity has to be fluid enough to encompass, and thereby resolve justly, every possible situation that can be brought before a court, but also rigid enough that each case is not decided in a completely arbitrary fashion. I suppose many of the cases that are brought to suit have fact patterns similar enough to past cases that they can be decided based on good case law, but in the event that a case arises where there is not a clear and definitive way to adjudicate it based on prior case law, the court has to create more rules, factors, and elements to follow in order to come to a conclusion that is just from both a policy perspective as well as a justice perspective. 

What is really interesting to me is how, because there are so many different factors or elements that must be proven or disproven, it actually is possible to argue for either party. In other words, there is usually so much grey area in the law and past cases, that there isn’t always an obvious answer to the case at hand. Or maybe all the obvious cases are resolved without appeals and therefore never make it into a case book. In a sense, every case can be answered with, "It depends." Sometimes it starts to get under my skin. In law, 2 + 2 isn’t always 4. At times I feel like I need a straight answer and often, the law is unwilling to give it to me.