It's book review time!

It can't be all law, all the time, right? So I read a book. Or tried anyway. And now you get to hear about it:

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore


My rating: 1 of 5 stars
It saddens me to say this, but, though I tried and tried to like this book, I couldn't even make myself finish it. Enough people I trust have told me how brilliant Moore is that I may still try her short stories. But here, I just couldn't find anything redeeming. The whole thing felt like it was written by someone with no knowledge or experience of what she was writing about. I didn't care about or, even worse, believe in the characters. Quite frankly, they all seemed like bland caricatures, and the few attempts at depth felt like nothing more than intrusions of the author's own thoughts and words. The characters themselves couldn't support their weight. In short, the whole thing felt like a sham.

I should acknowledge here that I have yet to find a single negative professional review of this book, so maybe I'm totally off base. But I will also point out that many of these reviews do mention Moore's "clumsiness" at several major points in the novel. They just seem to think it's forgivable, because the rest of the book is so fantastic. Maybe so, but I couldn't see it. And I really did try.

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What I'm Learning, Part 2: Civil Procedure

OK, this one's going to be a toughie, but I'm going to give it a shot.

Here's what the DU Course Catalog has to say about Civil Procedure:

Students enrolled in Civil Procedure learn how Constitutional statutory and judicial rules frame the determination of court controversies. They also explore the doctrines, remedies, and other principles pertinent to judicial dispute resolution.

After three weeks in the course, here's what I have to say about it: Jurisdiction is really freaking complicated.

Jurisdiction is, of course, just one of (I'm sure) many crucial elements of civil procedure, but so far it's pretty much all we've talked about. So what is it? As my professor would say, "Jurisdiction is power." Namely, the power of a court to hear and decide cases, based on who's involved and what they're about. Jurisdiction breaks down into personal jurisdiction and subject jurisdiction, but we haven't gotten into the subject kind yet. Personal jurisdiction is power over people, or their property, and the big question is: When does a state have jurisdiction over a person (or his or her property) who doesn't want them to have that jurisdiction?

There are four ways to get jurisdiction without much of a fight: Domicile, Presence, Consent, and Adjudication of Marriage. If you live in the state, or happen to be there long enough for someone to hand you a summons, or say OK, you can have jurisdiction over me (maybe just by failing to say otherwise), then that's that. And if your spouse lives there and wants to divorce you, they can. So far, so good. The "presence" thing gets a little weird when a state gets jurisdiction over someone just because somebody handed them a summons while in an airplane flying over that state (that totally happened), but at least it's a simple concept: you're here, we gotcha, end of discussion. And really, all of it was pretty simple back when people got around in wagons and had to have a really good reason to take the time and effort to move from one state to another. But nowadays?

The big case we read, and to which we refer back over and over and over again, is about shoe salesmen in Washington State in 1945. Seriously. It's called International Shoe Co. v. State of Washington and it totally changed everything about personal jurisdiction. I won't bore you (even more) with the details, but basically the court decided that there was something called "minimum contacts" that could make one subject to jurisdiction in a particular state -- like maybe employing some shoe salesmen there for several years. Unfortunately, what constitutes minimum contacts is not remotely straightforward, because the court in Shoe threw in a bit about not "offending traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice" in granting jurisdiction. Courts have basically been trying to decide what that really means ever since.

OK, this is getting really long and dull. Maybe you noticed. To finish up, I'll just say that it's amazing how hard it is to figure out who gets to adjudicate what once you have people driving and flying all over the place and commercial goods getting sent to and from pretty much everywhere in the world. And the Internet? Don't even ask. According to the syllabus, next week we move on to subject matter jurisdiction, and truthfully, I'm a little relieved. I think my brain needs a change of gears, however small, rather than ever-increasing complications. Just a little time to let things settle is all I ask.

I'll probably try to do these little summaries every few weeks. I may or may not be able to make them more interesting to all of you, but I think they do force me to think back and put everything in context. (Even if what I've written here is a complete mess, I actually feel like it sort of makes sense to me.) In any case, that's it for now (my only other class is called "Lawyering Process," and it's all about how to write briefs and memos and stuff, so I won't bother summarizing it for the public at large). Thanks for bearing with me.

What I'm Learning, Part 1: Torts

I thought I'd try something a bit different today, and maybe attempt to give my non-law-student readers some idea of the sorts of things I'm actually learning in this fancy new school of mine. I have no reason to believe I can do this in anything like an entertaining manner, so I won't be offended if you doze off and/or skip to the end after the first couple of sentences. Plus, I'm new at this, so I'm likely to get some of it dead wrong. With that in mind, let's start with Torts.

So a tort is basically a wrong done to another, leading to civil liability. By civil, I mean non-criminal, meaning it's mostly about money, rather than jail time. So far, we've been focusing on the idea of negligence -- just one of several "theories of recovery" we will eventually cover -- and a big part of figuring out what counts as negligence is figuring out what a "reasonable person" is. If you injure someone (physically, mentally, economically) while behaving in a way other than how a reasonable person would under the circumstances, chances are, you're negligent. Of course, the whole idea of the reasonable person is a legal fiction, but lawyers and judges and such tend to think of it as an objective standard. In other words, there may not be any actual reasonable persons out there, but we all know how they would act if there were.

Anyway, whatever a reasonable person may be, not everyone gets to (or has to) be held to that standard. We've learned that children are excepted, as long as they're engaged in "childlike activities." But if they're driving a car (or a snowmobile, as in one of the cases we read), for example, they're treated as adults, 'cause that's an adult thing to do. The physically disabled have a different standard, but not the mentally disabled. (And no, you can't get off just by claiming to be really dumb, either. Trust me, somebody already tried it.) Then there are people held to a higher standard, like "common carriers" -- bus companies, subway lines, airlines, etc. -- who are expected to take the "utmost care" achievable by human means...or something like that. And there are doctors, of course, who are expected to be rather better at, say, heart transplants than just your average "reasonable person." And the list goes on.

There's all kinds of other stuff that goes into deciding what's reasonable. Statutes enacted by the legislature can make certain actions -- or the lack of certain actions -- negligence by law. But some of them can be ignored under certain circumstances, like when obeying them would actually put you in danger. And then there's custom: if a certain behavior seems reasonable to an outsider, but isn't customary in your line of work, or vice versa, you might get cut some slack. And depending on the laws and facts involved, a judge may make these determinations or may leave it to a jury. Oh, and it may just depend on what state you're in. Or what decade.

So basically, what I've been doing is reading case after case (after case after case) exploring these issues from various intricate angles. My current count shows that we've read and/or discussed seventeen cases in some kind of depth, and have encountered more than 70 others in the course of that reading and discussion. That's over the course of six class sessions. So yeah, there's a lot of reading, and a lot of information. And did I mention that all of the above concerns just one of the four factors to be considered in determining negligence? Which, again, is only one of several theories of recovery we need to learn about? We've got a long way to go. Thankfully, so far, I'm loving it.

That's probably enough for now. Stay tuned for the next post all about Civil Procedure. It's more interesting than it sounds.