Ok. It's Friday in May; it's been a very, very long year. Time for a little fun. (Hope I don't regret this post.)
Amidst all the talk of reform of law school, here's something that I think gets lost. Rather than working on whole-scale changes (many of which are excellent ideas but require coordination among many people and perhaps substantial changes in personnel) why don't individual faculty members work on incremental changes?
One place that can happen is in making our classes more interesting to students. This is an idea I first heard about from Maurice Rosenberg lo' those many years ago when I was a law student. He gave this (what in hindsight I now realize is brilliant advice): write a case and include cases that will interest students. Elegant in its simplicity, though not the easiest thing to carry off. (And I think what interests students may be rather different from what interests us as faculty.) It's taken me a long time to fully understand the wisdom of both pieces of that simple advice. But what really drove home this point for me was a student many years ago who read People Magazine before class. It seemed like every week she had a couple more example of cases that involved legal issues. So she's talk about these before class and ask us what we all thought about them. Never ceases to surprise me how much I learn from students.
Why, then, don't we take more examples for our classes from People Magazine?! Sure, that may be easy for people who teach criminal law, torts, family law... maybe even intellectual property. They can talk about all sorts of things, like assault by (or against) stars, rights of publicity and privacy, defamation, custody battles between movie stars, the list goes on and on.
Now, maybe you're like me and you teach wills, property, remedies, maybe a practicum in probate and a class on will drafting ever now and then. What's in there for us? Well, maybe more than you'd expect. Back when Ms. Anna Nicole Smith passed away, I used Gerry Beyer's terrific discussion of the issues in her will in my trusts and estates class. And there's no shortage of wills of the stars--from George Washington to the Elvis. (Thank you Court TV!) There's no end to will contests.
So I'm going to start an occasional series (following up on Bergin's One to Watch) here at thefacultylounge on "The Law of People Magazine." It's going to be about cases involving stars--not necessarily only from People Magazine--that might be useful for teaching purposes. I hope other people will join in here.
There are two ways of thinking about this project. The more modest one is, "hey, here's an example of a legal issue that might light up discussion in class." The other one is to think about putting together a whole set of readings, perhaps across the curriculum, from People (or other similar publications). Sort of like, everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten. Here it's everything I need to know I learned by reading People.
What's the first installment? Well, for this I'll reach back a couple of years to one of my first posts at propertyprof: "Purple Pain for Prince's Landlord." It's a dispute between Prince and his landlord over Prince's redecoration of an estate he rented for $70,000 per month! As I said back in 2006, the smoking gun has the goods (i.e., the complaint). It's the makin's on some exciting discussion for the landlord-tenant section of property.
Alfred Brophy
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