Life's lessons learned

I was tired all day today! Normally that would be no strange occurrence; I’m in my first year of law school and I already have sleeping problems as it is. But last night I slept like a baby! I went to bed early, and got a full nine hours of sleep. I should have been fine. In my contracts class after lunch I was struggling to focus. It was even pretty interesting. We were going over a situation where a farmer let a couple of archeology students onto his land. With his permission they did some digging and found a fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex! (I’m not sure how they found this guy’s property in the first place. Sometimes cases don’t give you all the information you may want.) They got the farmer’s permission to dig up the fossil which they eventually removed and took to a museum. Then they sent the farmer a check for $5,000. It all seems fine and dandy. Then these entrepreneurial archeologists turn around and sell the skeleton for over a million dollars! Then we had to dig up some way for the farmer to get a piece of the larger sum.

Unfortunately for the farmer he didn’t have a very good case, but my point remains: it was an interesting class and I was still sleepy. “Oh well,” I thought, “it’s right after lunch. I’ll get a second wind in a little while.” I managed to keep my eyes open the rest of class. We had a 15 minute break and then it was off to Criminal Law with the always interesting Professor Vitello.

In Criminal Law I was still tired! It’s my favorite professor for goodness sakes, and I still can’t keep my head in the game. I managed to pay attention, and with great effort came a great reward: because I was trying my best to look interested, I didn’t get called on once! Thank heavens. It was yet another interesting class.

For the last two classes in Criminal Law we have been going over forcible rape. Not the most pleasant subject. I never NEVER thought I would say this, but today I actually wished I was back at BYU. I’m contemplating deleting that sentence because of how anxious I became to get out of the Mormon marriage factory. I have said many things about the cultural nuances of the Mormon mecca that is BYU, but if there is one thing I have to admit it is that there was a moderate level of maturity in the classrooms. Whenever we were talking about an awkward subject it was approached carefully and respected. There were no penis jokes in my anatomy classes. There was very little social commentary when we talked about the Bonobo monkeys vs. the Chimpanzees (they are genetically identical but are considered different species because Chimps fight to resolve their differences while Bonobos resolve theirs through “love?”).

Now with that background, enter McGeorge School of Law. Before class started today the girl in front of me was discussing the ratio of floaters to sinkers. Gross. The maturity level didn’t necessarily ascend during class either. I wont share all of the hullabaloo that goes on in class, but here is an example of a funny situation that happened last week. Rape of the first degree has two major elements: force and lack of consent. We did manage to have some interesting discussions on how the law-makers (predominantly male) to some extent expect victims (usually women) to react like a man would (viz. fight back). One student just could not get over the force requirement for conviction. He said, “I just don’t see why force is necessary. Can’t a lack of consent be enough for conviction?” Our teacher then explained lack of consent often isn’t communicated verbally. He gave several hypotheticals, and ended with him asking this student, “now try to imagine a situation where there is force AND there is consent.” The class was watching David try to imagine this situation. He got really red in the face, and after a second Professor Vitello said, “While you’re fantasizing about that, the rest of us are going to move on.”

Well, class was interesting and entertaining, but still I was exhausted. I came home looking forward to a snack when I remembered what I had for breakfast. Chocolate chip cookies. Not exactly the breakfast of champions. I’ve learned several things today: don’t let random archeology students onto your property, don’t be a rapist, and I need to eat better breakfast. Man, I need a wife.