Promises, Premeditation, and the Lease You Can Do
A week spent asking when promises become enforceable, when killings become premeditated, and what happens when you overstay your welcome — in a lease or otherwise.
This was the week where every class seemed to be asking a version of the same question: how much does context matter when we draw bright lines? In Contracts, we wrestled with whether a promise made after someone saves your life is enforceable — even though it violates every rule about past consideration. In Criminal Law, we tried to pinpoint the exact moment when an intent to kill becomes premeditated, and two cases with opposite sympathies made the distinction feel almost arbitrary. Property shifted gears entirely — from co-ownership’s partition headaches into the world of landlord-tenant law, where the common law framework is slowly being overtaken by statutory regulation. And in LARW, the NextGen Performance Test landed, giving us a taste of what the new bar exam expects. Four classes, one theme: the law is always simpler in the abstract than in the particular.
When Moral Obligation Meets Legal Obligation
Contracts this week covered the tail end of consideration doctrine — modifications, previously received benefit, and promissory estoppel — and each topic felt like the law trying to patch its own gaps. Alaska Packers’ Ass’n v. Domenico is the pre-existing duty rule in its starkest form: fishermen who renegotiated their wages mid-season got nothing, because doing what you’re already obligated to do isn’t new consideration. But Angel v. Murray softened that — the Restatement section 89 carve-out for unanticipated circumstances gives courts a way to enforce modifications that feel genuinely fair.
The moral obligation cases were the ones that stuck with me. Mills v. Wyman — the Good Samaritan who nursed a sick adult son, only for the father’s promise of payment to be declared unenforceable — still feels wrong, even once you understand the reasoning. Past consideration is past consideration. But then Webb v. McGowin pushes back: a man who was permanently injured saving another man’s life did get the subsequent promise enforced under a theory of material benefit. Barnes walked us through Restatement 86 with the care of someone defusing a bomb — the promise is binding to prevent injustice, unless the benefit was a gift or the promise is wildly disproportionate. The minor child hypothetical brought it home: if it’s your fifteen-year-old son who’s been cared for, the benefit to you is real because you have a legal duty to care for that child. If the son is an adult, the benefit was to him, not to you, and the promise falls apart. A clean distinction that hinges on a single fact.
Thursday’s class on promissory estoppel felt like the doctrine the law invented for when consideration just doesn’t work. Ricketts v. Scothorn — the grandfather’s promissory note that let his granddaughter quit her job — could have gone the way of Kirksey v. Kirksey if Restatement 90 hadn’t existed. Barnes made the connection explicit, and it clicked: promissory estoppel is the safety net beneath the consideration trapeze. The subcontractor cases — Weitz Company v. Hands, Inc. and the bid-shopping problem — showed how the doctrine works in commercial practice, where reliance is measured in dollars, not just changed circumstances.
The Premeditation Problem
Criminal Law this week was all homicide — murder classifications, the premeditation-deliberation distinction, and the voluntary manslaughter mitigation. The Midgett and Forrest pairing is one of those textbook matchups that does exactly what it’s supposed to do: make you uncomfortable.
In Midgett, a 300-pound father beats his eight-year-old, 40-pound son to death over a period of sustained abuse. Horrible facts. The Arkansas court reduces it from first-degree to second-degree murder on a grave bodily injury theory because the evidence showed he intended to abuse, not to kill. In Forrest, a loving son shoots his terminally ill father in the hospital — a mercy killing, arguably — and gets convicted of first-degree premeditated murder because he brought the gun, told the nurses his father was going to die, and pulled the trigger multiple times. Pham let the class debate it, and it got heated. One student argued Forrest didn’t deserve prosecution at all. Another pushed back hard — he clearly and deliberately killed his father, regardless of motive. The real lesson was Pham’s distinction: motive is not mens rea. Why you kill goes to sympathy; whether you planned it goes to the charge.
The Guthrie standard versus the Morrin standard for defining premeditation was illuminating. West Virginia’s “fully conscious of intent” feels like it could swallow all intentional killings into the premeditated category. Michigan’s “thought process undisturbed by hot blood” — with its requirement that a reasonable person have time for a “second look” — at least tries to draw a meaningful line. The MPC’s solution — just drop premeditation as a category and let sentencing handle the nuance — felt elegant after watching us struggle with the distinction for an hour.
Leaseholds and the Long Shadow of the Common Law
Property pivoted hard this week. After wrapping up co-ownership on Monday, Casado-Perez launched into leaseholds — and with it, a different kind of property law altogether. The taxonomy of tenancies — term of years, periodic tenancy, tenancy at will, tenancy at sufferance — is straightforward on paper, but the notice requirements make it tricky in practice. A year-to-year periodic tenancy requires six months’ notice under common law, which means a tenant who walks out on September 30th without notice isn’t free until the following March. The class worked through the textbook problems together, and the ambiguity of problem three — where rent is defined as both $24,000 annually and $2,000 monthly — showed how jurisdictions can split on something as basic as what kind of tenancy you’ve created.
The real shift, though, was the move into Fair Housing Act territory. Casado-Perez spent considerable time unpacking the interplay between the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the FHA — both prohibit discrimination, but in different ways. The 1866 Act is narrower in scope (race only, moment of transaction, requires intent) but has no exceptions. The FHA is broader (more protected categories, covers conditions and conduct throughout the tenancy, allows disparate impact claims) but has the Mrs. Murphy exceptions for small landlords. The Wetzel v. Glen St. Andrew case — where a lesbian resident of a senior living community was harassed by other tenants and the management retaliated against her for complaining — created a circuit split about whether landlords can be liable for tenant-on-tenant discrimination. The analogy to Title VII employer liability was sharp: if you have the tools to address it — eviction, barring access, sanctions — and you choose deliberate indifference instead, that’s enough.
Bar Prep Begins in February
LARW was a split week. Monday was the Bluebook citation Jeopardy game — explanatory parentheticals, the difference between “see” and “see also” signals, and why you never put parentheticals in footnotes. Murphy’s rule of thumb: if a case is important enough for analogical reasoning, it deserves a full illustration, not a parenthetical. Parentheticals are for the supporting cast, the “see also” cases that drive the point home without doing heavy lifting. Wednesday dropped the NextGen Performance Test — In re Anderson, a workers’ compensation fact pattern about whether a handyman is an employee or an independent contractor. The right-of-control test, the Doyle factors, two opposing appellate decisions to synthesize. It’s the new bar exam format, and it felt exactly like what we’ve been training for all semester: read the file, find the rule, apply it to the facts, write the memo. Murphy told us to approach it like we would a regular memo, and honestly, that was the most reassuring thing anyone said all week.
Midterms are breathing down our necks — Contracts on Friday, Criminal Law the following Wednesday. But this was one of those weeks where the material felt less like a firehose and more like a conversation.