Realization

Today, in Civil Procedure, at the very end of class, our professor announced an assignment not listed on the syllabus due tomorrow (i.e., 22.5 hours later). He posted a page-long hypothetical situation on our course website, and told us that we should come to class with a two-page written response, which should take two to three hours. I was a bit surprised, to say the least, but thankfully CivPro is my only class on Thursdays, so I’ve been working on it most of the afternoon and evening: reading in the library for hours, diligently reviewing my notes, meeting up with classmates to discuss, and meticulously writing my response.

And yet… why? There is no way that this will be turned in—he doesn’t want to read 120 of these! That’s when it hit me: this assignment has no bearing on anything except my understanding of subject-matter jurisdiction. Argh, my professor tricked me into studying harder… again! He keeps doing that to me. I want to argue that it’s not necessary, but I have to agree that it’s far more effective than merely suggesting that I ought to review 28 U.S.C. § 1332. All the same, I feel duped.

Speaking of CivPro—and legal trickery, for that matter—I have an awesome quote from my casebook from last night’s reading:

“Here is one of the many instances where the law achieved results thought desirable through the use of transparent fictions.”

The quote is referring to—well, it’s kind of tedious to explain. Trust me… you don’t want to know. What? You do? Um, okay, you asked: The quote is referring to diversity of citizenship with respect to corporations for establishing the original jurisdiction of a civil case in the federal district courts involving a corporation. Given that the citizenship of stockholders determines the citizenship of a corporation, the section operates under the premise that courts will treat a corporation as though all of its stockholders are from the state of its incorporation for the purposes of original jurisdiction based on diversity. Talk about truthiness! Yet, it's a necessary fallacy: otherwise, the reality is that stockholders are probably from a large number of states, which would make it very difficult to have diversity of citizenship in a case to which a corporation is a party.

See? I told you that you didn’t want to know.

Anyhow, I have other things to share from this week, but I'll leave it until tomorrow, when I'll have more time to write.

9/26/08 EDIT: Well, I'll be darned if my Civ Pro professor didn't collect the assignment. Apparently he does want to read 120 papers this weekend...