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BaCK to sCHool
dred real estate attorneys on the ridiculously dry and technical subject of “off-record title defects” (don’t ask), which I had managed to make entertaining, somehow rising to the hard-to-follow challenge of an introduction as a real estate lawyer who doubled as a “stand-up come- dian.” I had also held forth in front of many more professionals at the annual meeting of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers when I was at the RTC, interspersing my disquisition on what the Resolution Trust Corporation really does with a fair number of well-appreciated pieces of humor. But, no audience that I had faced presented the chal- lenges that I imagined would be posed by law students.
All I had to fall back on was my cloudy recollection of the tech- niques that had been used by some of my professors in the few classes that I actually attended at Columbia (sorry again, Professor Farnsworth). I guess it would have been better if I had made it a habit to spend more time at school way back then. As I explained in Chapter Nineteen, how- ever, to the extent that I did go to class when I had been in law school, I learned to view the case method of teaching as useful, but limited, and felt that, especially for the student with no commercial background (me), there was a failure to explain the underlying purposes of the “rules” in courses that related to that central element of our culture, capitalism. I also learned later that what I was taught in law school bore little resemblance to what I dealt with in practice.
Now that I was going to be a professor, albeit an adjunct, I was determined to construct a course that would address those limitations. Accordingly, in advance of creating and publishing the description of the new course and its first assignment on the school’s website, I had to prepare for months and make myriads of decisions. To make matters more difficult (a proclivity that I had developed and honed since my days at P.S. 193), I decided that I could not conduct the first class with- out having first prepared the entire course. (How can you write a novel when you have not decided what will happen in the last chapter?)
To do that, I had ordered and read through about twenty possible casebooks (all free and delivered to me with pleasure by the three larg- est competing publishers), had selected one to have the class purchase,
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