What would you say was the most difficult law topic in 1L for you to wrap your head around?
I’m thinking things like intent, commerce clause, consideration…I’m curious if there are any short list of topics people wish they could have spent more time on.
Rule against perpetuities /thread.
parol evidence “rule”
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No con law? Sounds TTT to me.
this has to be the trickier parts of Erie and Res Judicata/non-mutual offensive claim preclusion. Although PER is up there.
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I think a lot of this will depend on what your professors choose to emphasize. For example, we didn’t even discuss the rule against perpetuities in Property (except to say that we weren’t going to discuss it), but my professor loved estates and future interests, so we talked about all the rest of it.
Having said that, the hardest topic for me, by far, was the rules surrounding CCRs when there was no common plan. Who could enforce against whom, etc… Took me quite a while to grapple with all of that.
Not that difficult lil breh
I had a tough time mastering the intricacies of the Chevron doctrine in leg reg/administrative law. Also depending on the prof, estates and future interests can take a bit to get used to, but it’s not that difficult conceptually really.
Some civ pro shit like Erie or Supplemental Jurisdiction or some of the weirder joinder rules and loopholes
Nothing is really conceptually “difficult.” A more appropriate title would be “most obnoxiously unclear 1L topic.” With that, I’ll go with:
Any topic where the professor wants to get into policy and philosophy. Those type of questions can be a real pain. Civ pro topics like Erie are not that difficult at all. You just have to understand the process.
Erie is not terrible, but certainly not fun in application. Rule against perpetuities’ difficulty is overrated.
Probs future interests for me. Con law wasn’t a difficult topic, but the mc for it was hard as fuck.
Rule against perpetuities; Vertical and Horizontal Privity.
Augmented estates, though only because we used a state-specific statute and quasi-math created by the professor to determine appropriate percentages of qualifies distributions from portions of the estate. What made it hard was that we were required to use the professor’s equation, which didn’t really work without tweaks to the formulas, and those that attempted to use their own (and still got to the right answer) were not given points (and, in at least one case, accused of cheating!)
That said, our prof’s way of teaching RAP made it pretty easy (for our class, not for the real world.)
+1 to the parol evidence rule
I also had a lot of difficulty with personal jurisdiction. Not because it’s hard to understand, but because every decision had a bunch of opinions with no majority and our prof wanted us to mention them all on the exam. It was hard for me to put it all in a neat and understandable framework.
Given that we didn’t discuss the rule against perpetuities and just scratched the surface of the parole evidence rule, the Erie doctrine, future interests, and one or two of the other notoriously annoying 1L topics, I’d have to go with the above, too, for much the same reasons. The “test,” such as it is, is completely unclear: minimum contacts such that exercise of jurisdiction will not violate traditional notions of fair play and substantive justice. What the hell does that even mean? And then the stream of commerce controversies that follow (strict stream of commerce? purposeful availment? purposeful direction?) that have not been resolved yet by the Supreme Court just make it worse.
Glannon resolves a lot of the unclear aspects of the core doctrine, although there are still some things that are just blurry on the margins, because even the courts don’t really know what to do.
class attendance.