When the Doctrines Start Talking to Each Other

This was one of those weeks where the different classes started talking to each other in my head. The consideration doctrine in Contracts and the mistake doctrine in Criminal Law both come down to the same fundamental question: what was going on in someone’s mind, and how do we evaluate that from the outside? Contracts uses the objective theory of assent; Criminal Law asks whether mistakes are genuine and reasonable. Property’s future interests framework is all about precision in language — every word in a conveyance has consequences — which connects directly to what we’re learning in LARW about clear rule statements.

The Banana Peel Breakthrough

The LARW banana peel exercise was a perfect microcosm of what legal thinking actually is: you don’t just read cases in isolation — you have to figure out why courts reached different results on similar facts, and then articulate a rule that harmonizes all of them. That skill feels like it’s at the center of everything we’re learning.

We analyzed four premises liability cases involving banana peels on train platforms and buses, each reaching different results. The key insight: Goddard (defendant won — banana peel may have just been dropped, crowded platform where employees couldn’t see it) versus Anjou (plaintiff won — banana peel was black, dry, pressed down, platform was not crowded, employee stepped right over it). The developing rule had two elements: a time element (was the hazard there long enough for employees to discover it?) and a place element (was it in a location where employees worked and should have been looking?).

Professor Murphy emphasized that a well-crafted rule statement is the “highest compliment” a court can pay to an attorney — courts sometimes adopt attorney-drafted rules as their own opinions.

Consideration and the Art of Distinguishing

In Contracts, we went deep on consideration — the four failure categories (past consideration, gratuitous promises, illusory promises, pre-existing duty) and comparing Kirksey v. Kirksey with Hamer v. Sidway really made the doctrine click.

Both involve family promises, but the outcomes hinge on whether the promisor was bargaining for the promisee’s behavior or simply being generous with strings attached. In Kirksey, a brother-in-law told his widowed sister-in-law to move to his property and he’d give her a place to live. She uprooted her family, moved 60 miles, lived there two years — then he kicked her out. The court called it a mere gratuity. In Hamer, an uncle promised his nephew $5,000 if he refrained from smoking, drinking, and billiards until 21. The nephew complied, and the court found valid consideration: giving up a legal right constitutes legal detriment.

The rule of thumb Professor Barnes gave us: if the condition benefits the promisor, it’s more likely consideration; if it only benefits the promisee or helps them receive a gift, it’s more likely a conditional gift.

Causation’s Two Circles

Criminal Law hit strict liability, mistake of fact, mistake of law, and causation all in one week. The two-circle framework for causation — actual (but-for) and proximate (foreseeability) — is elegant, especially when it breaks down in the substantial-factor edge cases.

The substantial factor test handles the rare situation where two independent actors each cause independently sufficient harm — the but-for test fails absurdly (neither is a but-for cause because the other’s act alone would have killed), so courts ask whether each was a “substantial factor” in the harm.

The Weight of Neutral Rules

The heirs’ property discussion in Property stuck with me. It’s a powerful example of how seemingly neutral legal rules — partition by sale — can have devastating real-world consequences for specific communities. African-American farming families who died intestate would have property divided among all heirs, creating tiny fractional shares. Land speculators would buy one small share and force a partition by sale, destroying family farming operations.

Professor Casado-Perez told us about Professor Thomas Mitchell, who taught at our school and later won a MacArthur Fellowship for drafting the Uniform Partition of Heirs’ Property Act. That’s the kind of thing that makes me want to pay close attention to the policy dimensions behind every doctrine we learn.

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Heavy week, but a good one.