Odd Places To Make Final Stands: Tales from Teaching Corps
posted by Dave Hoffman
Have you ever had the experience, when teaching, of finding yourself getting incredibly worked up about a point of procedure, technicality, or minutia, to the degree that for that moment that it seems like a subtle moment of principled revelation? That’s where I was last night, talking about “enterprise liability” in Minno v. Pro-Fab, 2007 WL 42292625 (Ct. App. Oh. 2007). By the end of the discussion of whether it was appropriate to piece a corporate veil to find liability against a sister corporation, where the evidence of fraud was limited to failure to buy liability insurance (!), I felt like I was two seconds away from standing on a desk and shouting
“Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir!”
I was only able to restrain myself by considering that, even as we were debating this nice issue, the likelihood that A.I.G. was going to go bankrupt probably had increased by 20 or 30%.
As I told the class, if I could only have talked in that moment to myself as a young boy, who wanted to be a fireman, I’d have trouble explaining how or why I’d decide to make my stand defending the rights of small corporations to their settled expectations against tort creditors. (If that was, indeed, the root of my objection to Minno. Maybe the case is just terribly written.) Teaching outside of the public law canon, I guess you find yourself finding unexpected, small, odd places in the law where bad doctrine seems to implicate really big issues.
Maybe others have had similar experiences. So tell me, where’s the oddest, most-seemingly-obscure, place in the law that you’ve found yourself saying “The line must be drawn here! This far and no further! And I will make them pay for what they’ve done!” And did your students look at you as if you were a raving maniac too?
September 16, 2008 at 9:17 am
Posted in: Law School
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Responses (1)
Nate Oman - September 16, 2008 at 9:21 pm
I found myself getting really worked up over the automatic perfection of payment intangibles when I taught In Re Commerical Money Center. I take my stand against the creation of secret sales of payment streams from lease contracts. Asset securitization is already opaque enough without the banks screwing it up with their special pleading in the Code for loan participations. Besides, if the payment intangibles category was about loan participations, then why for the love all that is holy didn’t they just draft the statute to say “loan participation”?!?
Okay. I am going to go lie down for a while now…
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