In the first year of law school, with few exceptions, everyone takes the same classes. The idea is that all law involves at least some aspects of either criminal law, torts, contracts and property. In addition you take federal rules of civil procedure, even though most people don't practice in federal court. But, states rules are usually pretty close.
My contracts professor was a nut. He had a Ph.D in philosophy and while he had a law degree I don't think he ever took the bar or intended to practice law. That's the funny thing about law school, and perhaps to an extent academia in general. They value the rank of the law school, not whether the professor is actually competent to practice law. Great thing about this guy is he didn't even go to a particularly good law school.
He was all about technology. Because of this, his classes were extremely different than any others. In the standard class, particularly the first year, the school likes to use something called the Socratic Method. The idea is that the professor calls on one person, and that person is supposed to recite the facts of the case, and then what the "holding" was. The holding is the general rule that the case stands for. Most of these are pretty old cases, but they still get cited. For instance, in torts, we had a case about some kids in school fooling around in class. This one kid was kicking this other kid in the shin and unbeknownst to the kicker, the kickee had some weird disease that made his bones brittle and generally very susceptible to injury. So he develops this pretty complicated injury and the family sues. The kicker's family argues that he should only be liable to the extent a normal person would be injured. The judge disagreed and held that you generally take the victim as you find him. Or, the eggshell skull rule.
So in a typical class, you would flush out the ruling through a series of questions, then there would be the inevitable back and forth about whether you agreed with the holding or not and whether it was good policy. In a big class, you may only get called on once in the entire semester, but it could be for 20 minutes. Our contracts professor made us purchase these "clickers" for his class. The way it worked is he would ask the entire class a multiple choice question and you could key in your answer through the clicker. He would then get an instant distribution of how the class voted, sort of like asking the audience in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." I happened to think this was the better way to go, not only for assessing your own knowledge, but for the professor to understand what concepts people were grasping or not.
He still felt like he had to do the Socratic method though. But you could tell his heart wasn't in it. The problem with the Socratic method is that it takes a long time because the student has to think through the answers, may not be super familiar with the facts etc. So our boy would ask a student to lay out the facts of the case, let them get out approximately seven words, and then take over, regardless of how well the person was doing. He also had this habit of calling on people who were on the exact opposite side of the direction he was facing (class was arranged like 3 sides of a rectangle with the podium at the other side, but he never taught from the podium). It would be so random because sometimes he wouldn't even switch topics, but he loved switching up people. He also had a hard time with pronouncing even basic names. For whatever reason he tended to believe that people in his class had adopted non-standard pronunciations of their names. So if your name was Maria he might pronounce it like Mary-A with a big emphasis on the "A".
His other love of technology was carrying around the smallest laptop possible. This thing must have had a 7 inch screen max! He would wander in with this thing, and then have the hardest time reading the screen or finding the right keys to hit. So a good portion of the class was spent with him bent over the laptop, squinting and awkwardly using one finger to type.
I learned the reason for his small computer when I visited his office. It was something out of hoarders. There was crap everywhere, the bookshelves were filled to the bursting point, there were books all over the floor, some still in their original wrappers. He must have had 6-8 old computers just scattered around in there. Some were super old too, like the giant cube monitors that used to let you type only in green font. There was random stuff too, like a samurai sword. Not mounted on the wall - just lying around just in case he needed to fend off an attacker. When you came to visit with him, he would motion for you to sit on a chair that was overflowing with papers. You would try to take this stack and put it on the stacks covering the floor. Every time you came back, there would be a fresh stack there. Random shipping boxes were strewn about, some had been broken down, others not. The only area that was free was the one chair he used. There was just enough space on that tiny desk of his to put the computer. It wasn't enough to put the whole computer on, just enough to put more than 50% of it so that it didn't fall off.
Like most classes, the entire grade depended on how you did on the final exam. His exams were always entertaining because he would use the exam to make fun of other professors and the administration. Most exams are attempts to model what it would be like to get a client with an issue. So it is a long narrative with various legal events happening. He had a review before the class and essentially gave the entire fact pattern at the review session. It didn't really matter, you are graded on a curve, but he was of course the only one to do this.
The next year, when I was on Law Review, I chose him to be my adviser. I chose him because I wasn't actually at all interested in Law Review. Law Review is the biggest scam there is, but it looks good on your resume. So even though I had zero interest and was working full time at this point, I did it. It is a pass/fail class that I cam dangerously close to failing. You have to write a paper over the course of the year and at certain points you have to meet with your advisor. Luckily, my contracts professor thought that the term "meet to confer" on your paper was satisfied by sending me a "read receipt" over e-mail after I sent him the draft. Other people were having these super long meetings and writing multiple drafts, but I knew I had chosen correctly.
I would sometimes drop by his office in future years, but he was never there. Fortunately it seemed to only get more cluttered!
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