Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Week Five of Law School

Going Strong! Quiz. Torts. It was good. Made me think. Made me read closely. (Excuse me, apparently, I'm having a Hemingway-esque writing style moment. Can Sidra confine herself to no more than three words per sentence for an entire post? Let's observe.)

Made me go home and look it up.

(Ah, that would be 'no'. Hemingway, it seems, has left the building. No doubt to go whale-watching.)

The really fun bit was the conversation I had with a fellow student about transferred intent before the quiz that nearly made us late. Also, looked that up, and, of course, when the heat's not on, I find precisely the quote I wanted at the time, that when a defendant "intends any one of the five*, his intent will be 'transferred' to make him liable for any of the five, provided the harm is direct and immediate." What my fellow student had been focusing on was that many of our 'hypothetical' cases considered in class involved something like meaning to hurt (or, say, frighten) one person and actually hurting another by mistake, and I hadn't been looking so much at the transferring between people as just the concept of 'transferring' intent in general so that you can find someone liable for the result of their action, whether it's a result they intended to create or not.

So we had a kind of disconnect in our language when we tried to talk about intent.

Which was fun. To me, at least.

Anyway. Week Five. Good so far.

[*] Assault, battery, false imprisonment, trespass to land, trespass to chattels. These are all very old 'torts', or wrongdoings, for which a person may sue in a civil court for damages.

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