Catching Up from the Couch

This was the week the flu finally caught me. I missed Property twice, LARW twice, signed in remotely for Criminal Law on Monday and then watched Professor Pham’s recorded lecture when she was sick herself on Wednesday. By Thursday I was deep in a pile of borrowed notes, slide decks, and recordings, trying to stitch together four classes’ worth of material from the outside looking in. And yet, even processed secondhand through a NyQuil haze, the week had a unifying thread I could not shake: every single class was grappling with the same fundamental question — when does pressure, power, or punishment cross the line from legitimate to unreasonable?

The Felony Murder Tightrope

Professor Pham spent both Criminal Law sessions this week walking us through the judicially imposed limitations on the felony murder rule, and the classroom debates were genuinely riveting — even through a recording. The core tension is elegant in its difficulty. The felony murder rule exists to deter dangerous conduct and to match punishment with culpability, but without limitations, it swallows everything. Tax evasion that somehow leads to a death becomes murder. Selling alcohol to a minor becomes murder. The inherently dangerous felony limitation is the judiciary’s attempt to cabin that expansion, and the two approaches for applying it — on the facts versus in the abstract — illustrate how much a legal test’s framing can predetermine its outcome. Pham made this vivid with the Rhode Island child neglect statute: on the facts, a mother who left a newborn to feed itself committed something horrifically dangerous. In the abstract, a parent whose 17-year-old lives with a roommate who drinks too much has also violated the statute — but dangerously? Hardly. The same statute, two framings, opposite results. One student pushed back hard, arguing that any time someone dies there is moral culpability worth punishing. Pham’s response stuck with me: “Punishment itself causes a cost. I don’t know if it makes sense to build a system where we deter every possible action because there’s some possibility to prevent all deaths.” That line deserves a place in my outline.

Economic Duress, Undue Influence, and the Space Between

Professor Barnes, running on what he candidly described as about ten percent of his usual energy — he forgot to start the Zoom recording and missed his own material on Section 161 nondisclosure and capacity — still managed to deliver a memorable class on Austin Instrument v. Loral Corp. and Odorizzi v. Bloomfield School District. The Austin Instrument setup is essentially Alaska Packers but for precision military gear components instead of fish: a subcontractor threatens to stop delivering parts to a Navy radar contract unless Loral pays more, and Loral has no alternative suppliers. Barnes distilled economic duress to its bones — wrongful threat, no reasonable alternative, bad faith. But the real spark came with Odorizzi, the 1960s case of a closeted gay schoolteacher pressured into resigning at two in the morning after forty hours without sleep. It is not quite duress, the court held, because the school district was within its legal rights to terminate him under the laws of the time. But it is undue influence — excessive pressure on a person who is particularly susceptible. Barnes connected it to ambulance chasing, to deathbed estate manipulation, even to his own experience collapsing “like a cheap card table” under multi-level marketing tactics. The overlap between these doctrines and Criminal Law’s felony murder debate was impossible to miss: both are asking how much pressure the system tolerates before the resulting agreement — or the resulting punishment — becomes illegitimate.

Landlords, Tenants, and the Duty to Be Reasonable

I missed both Property classes to the flu, so I owe Princess Egbuchunam for her notes. Professor Casado-Perez covered an enormous swath of landlord-tenant law across the two sessions — consent clauses for subleasing (Kendall v. Ernest Pestana), self-help eviction (Berg v. Wiley), the duty to mitigate damages (Sommer v. Kridel), the covenant of quiet enjoyment (Village Commons v. Marion County), and the implied warranty of habitability (Hilder v. St. Peter). Then on Wednesday, the class pivoted to real estate transactions: the Statute of Frauds, part performance, estoppel (Hickey v. Green), marketable title (Lohmeyer v. Bower), and the hierarchy of deed types from general warranty down to quitclaim. What struck me, reading through this material while sick, was how much of landlord-tenant doctrine is an evolving answer to the same line-drawing question. A landlord cannot unreasonably withhold consent to an assignment. A landlord cannot use self-help to evict — even if the tenant is violating the lease. A landlord must mitigate damages rather than sit idle while rent piles up. The common law started from a position of near-absolute landlord power, and the modern trend, case by case, has been to impose duties of reasonableness. That same arc — from raw power to constrained fairness — is exactly what the felony murder limitations and duress doctrines are doing in Criminal Law and Contracts.

Texas Citations and the Art of Persuasion

LARW was the most procedurally dense class of the week. Professor Murphy devoted significant time to the mechanics of citing Texas Courts of Appeals cases — the parenthetical history notation system (no pet. h., no pet., pet. filed, pet. granted), the distinction between civil petition history and criminal petition history, and the moment when genuine Bluebook subsequent history replaces the parenthetical notation entirely. It is painstaking, granular work, but Murphy made a persuasive case for why it matters: every parenthetical tells the reader something about the reliability of the authority you are citing. A case that is pet. granted is live ammunition that might explode; a case that is no pet. is settled law. Beyond citations, Murphy introduced persuasive techniques for the trial brief — juxtaposition of bad facts with good ones, story arc, the Elmore Leonard principle of leaving out the parts readers skip. “I should be able to read the first sentence of your statement of facts and know immediately which side you represent,” she said. “If I can’t tell that, you screwed up.” The trial brief is due shortly after spring break, and building it feels like the practical synthesis of everything this semester has been about — taking rules from every class, case names from every reading, and marshaling them into an argument designed to persuade.

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Heavy week, but the flu gave me something I would not have gotten otherwise — the chance to read all four classes side by side and see how deeply their questions overlap. Now I just need my voice back before oral arguments.