Singing Loudly

Today ended the two day session of contracts at my barbri class. Boy did it ever go out with a bang. I think that a little context is helpful when discussing how these classes go. Approximately 500 people are sitting in this big room where a professor (usually from UT) is standing up at the mic reading his outline that he created. Just like Madlibs, we fill in the blanks when it's appropriate. There are no questions or anything. It's just 3.5 hours of filling in the blanks.

To make things a little more entertaining, the professors typically try to inject some humor into their outlines. The only way this can really be done is by making the hypotheticals based on real people or actual events. For instance, one of the better ones today was illustrating the "lost volume" sort of idea in remedies of contracts. This one is easy to understand, let's say you are selling me your computer for $200. We make a contract and I breach the contract by not paying. You have a duty to attempt to curtail the damages. If your friend says, I'll buy it for $175 then you'd sell it and be able to collect $25 from me in damages. If your friend says, I'll buy it for $200 then the damages would be zero.

However, if you are a business and you lose a sale opportunity the situation is different. There you have lost volume. This professor made a hypo based on an actual public official (I believe from Illinois) who went to Sally's S&M Leather Shop for an outfit. He picked out one that was on the floor and signed the contract to purchase it the next day. Well, the next day news reports came out about his extramarital affair. Not wanting to further dig himself in the whole he did not go through with the purchase of the leather outfit. However, Janet Reno went to the store and purchased the same outfit.

That is the humor us law students enjoy in these dismal times.

The problem was that it got worse at the very end when a long set of many hypos dealing with 3rd Parties led up to the regretful punchline: Once again Al Gore was beat out by Hanging Chad. All about Al Gore who had a claim that as an incidental beneficiary that was based on consideration against Chad (who was later hung) that had a previous incidental beneficiary that was based on consideration. When consideration is there the former beats the latter incidental. Too bad Al Gore.

Ahem.