Back from Break and the Weight of What Comes Next

There is no soft re-entry in law school. Spring break ended and Monday hit like a cold open — Professor Pham asking us about our vacations one minute, walking us through the common law definition of rape the next. That tonal whiplash set the pace for the entire week. Criminal Law pivoted into sexual assault doctrine, forcing us to sit with cases where the law’s machinery feels most obviously broken. Property, meanwhile, moved into title assurance — deed covenants, recording acts, and the quiet chaos of who actually owns what. LARW had us on Zoom workshopping trial briefs for a motion to suppress involving drug-sniffing dogs and probable cause. And Contracts? Barnes gave us a lecture, but no transcript survived — just a recording sitting in iCloud, proof that some weeks you capture everything and some weeks you don’t. The thread running through all of it: what counts as proof, and who bears the burden of producing it.

The Robbery Comparison That Won’t Leave My Head

The centerpiece of Criminal Law this week was the arc from common law rape through reform — State v. Alston, Rusk v. State, Commonwealth v. Berkowitz, In the Interest of M.T.S., and Commonwealth v. Lopez — tracing how jurisdictions have struggled to define force, consent, and the relationship between them. Professor Pham framed the whole unit as a temporal progression, and she was right that it produces “intellectual whiplash.” We moved from the 1984 Alston court concluding that a history of domestic violence was too “generalized” to constitute force, to the New Jersey Supreme Court in M.T.S. holding unanimously that nonconsensual penetration is itself force — full stop. That is a massive doctrinal distance to cover in two class sessions.

But the moment that stuck with me most came from Judge Wilner’s dissent in Rusk. He posed a question I keep turning over: if Edward Rusk had taken Pat’s wallet under those exact same circumstances — unfamiliar neighborhood, late at night, car keys confiscated, light choking — nobody would question that it was robbery. The threat of force would be self-evident. So why, Wilner asked, is “such life-threatening action necessary when it is her personal dignity that is being stolen?” That comparison cuts through every doctrinal distinction we studied. It exposes the force/nonconsent gap as something more than a technical quirk — it is a value judgment about which harms the law takes seriously.

Mock Closing Arguments and a Jury That Could Not Agree

Pham did something I have not seen in any other class this semester — she had two students deliver full closing arguments in Rusk, prosecution and defense, to a student jury drawn from the section. The jury instruction required finding either that Pat resisted and her resistance was overcome by force, or that she was prevented from resisting by threats to her safety. The jury deliberated in real time, and it was messy. Several jurors could not get past the fact that Pat — not Rusk — was the one who introduced the word “killing.” Others argued that his response of “yes” to her desperate question constituted an implicit threat. The jury never reached a unanimous verdict.

That exercise did more for my understanding of the resistance requirement than any case brief could. Watching classmates genuinely struggle with whether hands on a throat during crying constitutes force — under a legal standard that demands resistance or explicit threats — made the Catch-22 visceral. As one juror put it, the government had not met its burden, but that did not mean nothing wrong happened. That gap is exactly what Berkowitz and M.T.S. later tried, in very different ways, to close.

Deeds, Covenants, and the Quiet Chaos of Ownership

Property moved into title assurance, and Professor Casado-Perez spent the week building a framework I suspect will be load-bearing for the final. Monday’s class covered the three types of deeds — general warranty, special warranty, and quitclaim — and the six covenants that attach to warranty deeds, divided into present covenants (seisin, right to convey, against encumbrances) and future covenants (general warranty, quiet enjoyment, further assurances). The key distinction: present covenants can only be breached at the moment of conveyance, while future covenants run with the land and can be enforced by anyone down the chain of title. We worked through a hypothetical where O conveys to A by general warranty, A to B by special warranty, B to C by quitclaim — and when a utility easement surfaces, only A can sue O, because the present covenants do not run and B guaranteed nothing about defects predating his ownership.

Wednesday pivoted to recording acts — race, notice, and race-notice jurisdictions — and the Messersmith v. Smith case, where a North Dakota court invalidated a recorded deed because the acknowledgment was done over the phone instead of in person. Casado-Perez quoted someone — she attributed it to Holmes — saying that real estate transactions are “chaos with an index.” That feels about right. The connection to Criminal Law is not obvious on the surface, but both units are fundamentally about the same problem: what constitutes adequate notice, and what happens when the system’s formalities fail the people it is supposed to protect.

Trial Briefs, Dog Sniffs, and the Craft of Persuasion

LARW was on Zoom this week — Murphy accommodated us while traveling — and the entire session was a workshop on the trial brief assignment. The problem involves a motion to suppress evidence from a vehicle search triggered by a drug-sniffing dog alert. The two issues: whether the dog sniff constitutes a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, and whether, if it does, there was independent probable cause under the totality of the circumstances. Murphy walked us through record citations, the structure of point headings, and how to sequence issues strategically — for the state, lead with the sniff issue; for the defense, frame the sniff as a search and then argue the remaining evidence falls short.

What struck me was how much the persuasive brief assignment draws on the analytical skills we have been building in every other class. Framing issues, marshaling facts, anticipating counterarguments — it is the applied version of what Pham does when she asks us to argue both sides of Rusk, or what Casado-Perez does when she makes us trace covenant enforcement through a chain of title. Murphy reminded us that oral arguments in front of the Court of Appeals are next Tuesday. Dress code, sign the roster, leave your backpacks in the hall. The formalities of practice, even in simulation.

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Heavy week, but a necessary one. The kind that reminds you why you are here — not because any of it is easy, but because all of it matters.