A note about the update delays and what happened on Tuesday...

As you might have noticed, my updates have started to come later and later. I apologize for this. The problem is that my evenings have been getting later and later. Last night, I walked through the door at 11 PM (don’t worry, Mom, it was perfectly safe). Needless to say, I was exhausted. Look for my posts before noon each day for a recap of the previous day.

Tuesday started with Torts. Actually, Tuesday started slightly before Torts. I was in the Starbucks line an hour before class started and I noticed Professor Weber (my Torts professor) getting in line behind me. I nodded “hello” to him and commented that he shouldn’t take it personally that I was getting Starbucks before his class. He laughed and said that he definitely needed it before our class. During class, there was a lively discussion about the duty of a third party to prevent harm when they know that it is possible or if they are in charge of the individual who might harm someone else. We studied a California case where a psychiatrist didn’t warn a murder victim of the danger she was in. The psychiatrist in the case was treating an individual who announced his intention to kill the victim. The court found that the psychiatrist was liable, and this sort of threw me. I always understood patient/physician privilege to be inviolable, but the caveat is that this trust cannot be violated unless there is likelihood that harm can be prevented. The dissenters in the case had a hard time with this. They argued (quite correctly, in my opinion) that real treatment is only successful when the patient has trust in his psychiatrist; without this trust, treatment will fail. Of course, in the case cited, it looks like the psychiatrist wasn’t doing a good job to begin with. I volunteered in class, and Professor Weber called me out by name. I was glad that I was right (in this case).

As soon as class was over, I bolted to the gym. On Monday, I discovered that my lunch cardio workout really gave me a lot of energy that lasted me through the day. I repeated this on Tuesday, and the results were the same. I showered and got back to school in plenty of time to review my Contracts for the afternoon.

In Contracts, we continued our discussion of unjust enrichment. Unjust enrichment covers cases where one party is enriched at the expense of another party, and the second party deserves some type of compensation for his efforts. The 3 theories of obligation in contracts covered thus far include bargain for exchange as consideration, promissory estoppel (where there really was no agreement, but there was a reliance-induced detriment that resulted as part of the deal), and unjust enrichment. I scored some points when the professor asked why, in a particular case, promissory estoppel was not used even though it had all of the right elements. I raised my hand and answered that promissory estoppel had not been established as a valid theory of obligation in 1901, the year of the case. It was only accepted in the Restatement of Contracts in 1932. I think that the rest of the class was a little surprised, but the professor had mentioned the development of the theory in previous classes. I am so glad that I had it right. My confidence in class is slowly building, but I am still not at the point where I will raise my hand every time.

After class, it was off to the library to continue reading. I covered Constitutional Law and most of my Civil Procedure class for today. The rest of the evening was spent on my legal analysis class assignment. Because it is a writing assignment, extra care had to be taken with regard to citation and references as well as style. I finished up around 10:30 and walked to the El with a couple of buddies. At 11, I was home and thoroughly exhausted. My roommate Eric returned from a concert not long after, and we watched the premier episode of My Name is Earl, the new Jason Lee comedy that we had DVRed. This is a funny, clever show. It has true cruelty in it (a la “Seinfeld”) but there is also a sweetness about the character. We laughed several times throughout the episode, and I am looking forward to next week’s installment.