Midterm Brain and the Art of Showing Up

This was the kind of week that collapses the clean lines of a semester into a single anxious blur. The Criminal Law midterm landed on Wednesday, and by Monday everything I did — or didn’t do — orbited around it. I missed Property on Tuesday to cram. I missed LARW on Monday for the same reason. The classes I did catch, though, kept circling a theme I hadn’t expected: the question of what we owe others, and the consequences — legal, moral, personal — of getting that wrong. From the Statute of Frauds to depraved-heart murder to a landlord’s duty to mitigate, the week was saturated with obligations and the mess that follows when people fail to honor them.

Promises on Paper and the Ghost of 1677

Monday’s Contracts class with Barnes — which I caught on the recording — was a masterclass in how the law handles the gap between a handshake and a signature. We’d just wrapped promissory estoppel the session before, and now Barnes pivoted into defenses, starting with the Statute of Frauds. What struck me most was how casually he dropped the historical frame: Parliament cooked up this list in 1677, and here we are, three and a half centuries later, still basically running the same categories. Real property, contracts over a year, guarantees, executor obligations — the MY LEGS mnemonic is silly, but it sticks. Barnes had fun with the one-year provision, and the hypotheticals were sharp. Hiring a butler “for life” doesn’t require a writing because Jeeves could theoretically die tomorrow — the contract is performable within a year. But hiring an 80s cover band to play a three-hour set at a wedding fifteen months from now? That needs a signature. It’s not about the duration of performance; it’s about the duration from formation. The real payoff came with Radke v. Brennan, which we barely started. Brennan sends a written offer to sell lakefront strips to his neighbors, one of them orally agrees at a revised price, and then Brennan tries to back out, invoking the statute. The question Barnes left us dangling on — whether the original offer letter constitutes “some note or memorandum” sufficient to satisfy the statute — felt like the kind of puzzle that rewards careful reading over instinct. Only the party resisting enforcement needs to have signed, and here, Brennan had signed the very letter he now wanted to hide behind.

Depraved Hearts and Desperate Parents

The Criminal Law midterm covered everything through intentional killings, but the reading assigned for the class I missed — People v. Knoller and State v. Williams — pushed into unintentional killings and the concept of depraved-heart murder. Even as exam prep material, these cases hit differently than most of the semester’s readings. In Knoller, a woman whose massive Presa Canario dogs mauled and killed a neighbor in a San Francisco hallway was convicted of second-degree murder on an implied malice theory. The facts are grotesque — over 77 discrete injuries, a severed jugular — but what the court really grappled with was whether Knoller’s awareness of the risk rose to the level of “conscious disregard for human life.” She’d been warned by a veterinarian, by the dogs’ prior caretaker, by roughly thirty prior incidents. At some point, not knowing becomes its own form of knowing. Then there’s Williams, and this one genuinely rattled me during study prep. Two young, poorly educated Native American parents — a Shoshone father with a sixth-grade education and a twenty-year-old mother — watched their toddler’s toothache turn gangrenous over two weeks. They gave him aspirin. They waited for the swelling to go down. They didn’t take him to the doctor because they were terrified the Welfare Department would take him away, and that fear wasn’t irrational — the Child Welfare League had spent a decade systematically removing Native children from their families. The court convicted them of manslaughter based on ordinary negligence. Washington didn’t even require gross negligence at the time. Studying for Pham’s midterm, I kept returning to the gap between the “reasonable person” standard and the actual, embodied people standing in front of the court. It’s the same tension Barnes raises with the Statute of Frauds — the law imposes a standard and then asks whether the human beings caught inside it had the capacity to meet it.

Murphy, Persuasion, and the Dog That Couldn’t Tell the Difference

I missed LARW on Monday but caught Thursday’s class with Murphy, and it was one of the more practically useful sessions of the semester. Murphy introduced the trial brief assignment — a criminal case involving a traffic stop, a dog sniff, and the question of whether a canine alert constitutes probable cause when the dog can’t distinguish between illegal marijuana and legal hemp. It’s a genuinely unsettled area of law, and Murphy was characteristically blunt about the research implications: Supreme Court cases, federal circuits, Texas courts — all relevant, all fair game. But the more interesting lesson was about persuasive writing itself. Murphy walked us through preliminary statements — the trial brief equivalent of the question presented and short answer from our research memos — and the examples made the distinction between objective and persuasive writing feel visceral. The prosecution calling a journalist’s website “her personal hobby blog” isn’t inaccurate — she’s a librarian, she doesn’t charge for the content — but it reframes the entire argument before the court even reaches the law. That single word choice, “hobby,” does more work than a page of legal reasoning. Murphy’s larger point landed too: if you can’t argue the other side’s case after writing your own brief, your brief is bad. It’s a principle that maps perfectly onto the midterm prep I’d been doing all week — you don’t really understand provocation doctrine until you can articulate why the court in Girouard refused to extend it to words alone, even when those words were devastating.

The Landlord, the Tenant, and the Question of Control

I missed Casado-Perez’s Property class on Tuesday for the midterm, but I worked through the slides and readings afterward, and the material on leaseholds kept surprising me with its connections to everything else. The core distinction between subleases and assignments in Ernst v. Conditt — whether a tenant transfers their entire remaining interest or retains a reversion — matters because it determines privity. And privity determines who can sue whom. The Tennessee court looked past the parties’ own label (“subletting”) and found an assignment based on the substance of the transfer. Labels don’t control — intent and structure do. That echoes something Barnes has been hammering all semester: the law cares about what actually happened, not what people called it. The Property slides also covered the Fair Housing Act and Wetzel v. Glen St. Andrew, where the Seventh Circuit held that a landlord can be liable under the FHA for tenant-on-tenant harassment if the landlord knew about it and was deliberately indifferent. The analogy to Title VII employer liability is elegant — landlords, like employers, have tools of control (eviction, restricting common areas, sanctions). What I found most interesting was the circuit split with Francis v. Kings Park Manor, where the Second Circuit said landlords lack sufficient control to justify liability. The Seventh Circuit’s response — that the degree of control should matter, and a retirement community with communal dining and programming has more of it than a standard apartment building — feels right to me. Duty scales with power.

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Brutal week, but I came out the other side with my head still attached — and a sharper sense of how obligation, awareness, and consequence thread through every corner of this semester.