Legal Commentary

My first day of Torts is on Monday, and despite the fact that I'm teaching it for my fifteenth or sixteenth time, I'm still anxious about setting the right tone and pitching the material at the right level for the new 1Ls.  I try to cover a variety of topics at some point in the first week, including what a tort is, what tort law is supposed to be for, alternatives to the tort system, what common law is, the various levels of courts in the American system, stare decisis and the hierarchy of authority, the limits of studying appellate decisions, what it means when you say "jurisdictions vary" and why there is no unified law of torts for the entire United States, how to tell if an authority is binding or merely persuasive, the "broad brush" differences between torts and crimes and between torts and contracts, and little about the historical development of tort law.  I also discuss, of course, trial court procedure, the importance of identifying the procedural posture of the case, what "elements" are and how to identify them, and what Restatements are.  That's a lot to try to do in the first few days, isn't it?  I don't assume that the students will master all of these topics.  Instead, I try give them the basic knowledge they need to read a case and to introduce themes and concepts that I'll refer to throughout the course.  One of the main ideas I try to introduce is that there are types of arguments that are distinctively recognizable as "legal," and throughout the course, I try to teach students to recognize and reproduce those arguments.  The article that most influenced the way I teach Torts was James Boyle's Anatomy of a Torts Class.  In the past I tried assigning it at the beginning of the semester, but I've found the students really aren't ready for it then.  Incidentally, I love the eagerness of 1Ls, even though 1Ls are much more "high-maintenance" than 2Ls and 3Ls.  My own 1L experience was one of the most intellectually invigorating of my life, and I always hope I can "pay it forward" by making the 1L experience equally invigorating for my students.