Book burning

I never thought I would ever attend a book burning...nor enjoy one. Too many shades of Nazi Germany and Christian fundies run amok. But I was invited to a barbecue by Murray, the author of "snarkyboy" and an underclassman who had just moved into third year by the skin of his teeth (as I did. I've subsequent to that obtained an 81 in Con Law, a 76 in Wills and Trusts, a 77 in Corporations, and a 76 in Remedies. The second year at our school seems designed to stick it to everyone). A new property professor was hired, who shall go unamed, who was proud of the low grades she gave and bragged about it to other attorneys. There always seems to be a percentage of teachers who go into teaching for the wrong reasons or into the law profession for the wrong reasons; who get a charge out of humiliating people, proving they are smarter, or whatever service to their ego they can obtain.

While I understand there are people who simply do not belong in law school, and I submit that I did, there are also a set number of people who get booted who probably don't deserve to. There are those who ascribe to the notion that people who do well in law school are smart and better lawyers, and those who don't are not. Those include a good proportion of people who do well in law school and are hoping against hope that their academic skills translate. As a law grad, I've learned to couch all my language in probabilities.

People who get higher grades tend to be brighter. People who go to better schools tend to be brighter. People who do well in school tend to be better lawyers. I'm not even sure how true all of these generalizations are, but I'm hedging.

In any case, this particular property teach taught out of a book written by California property guru Bernhardt and two others. Replete with spelling errors and such, the book, so I have heard, was a travesty.

While I consider almost ALL casebooks an assault upon the advances of education over the last one hundred years, and the vestiges of a medievel system of scholarship and grading that bears the same relationship to original trials in England as to the trials held now (You do realize the word "trial" meant armed combat, right?) this one was particularly bad. So there it was...up in flames...