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BaCK to sCHool
came to Columbia at the beginning of his last, ultimately fatal, campaign, he jested about the Rule in Shelley’s Case in the very first sentence of his speech to the assem- bled law students. I had never heard of it, and the moment always stuck with me. I assume that in some sense, my reference to the rule was an homage to the senator.]
TRUE OR FALSE
B-5. Fire good.
[False. “Fire bad” is constantly uttered by the Frankenstein character (played by Phil Hartman) in a famous series of sketches on Saturday Night Live, some of which are still available on YouTube. Fire is a hot issue in real estate documents, and I would do a Frankenstein/Hartman imitation when the subject was the negotiations concerning the rights of the parties in the event of a fire or other casualty in contracts of sale, leases, mortgages, etc.]
B-6. This statement is false.
[So is this.]
•••
Over the next fifteen years, I taught that course, Real Estate Finance, for two credits and then added a seminar called Real Estate Finance Work- shop, also for two credits. Real Estate Finance Workshop entailed drafting and other assignments, all of which related to a series of docu- ments that I invented based on the Marriott/Portman hotel transaction. There was no casebook. Better, there was no examination.
Finally, I taught a four-credit course called Real Estate Transac- tions and Finance, which, unlike the first two courses, met twice each week. I taught that course at the request of a senior faculty member and an assistant dean who astonished me by inviting me to lunch and asking me to develop a comprehensive introductory course in real estate. (As you know, one should be wary of free lunches.) I knew that, incredibly, Brooklyn Law School didn’t have an introductory real estate course, but I thought it very strange that they turned to an adjunct professor, rather than a full-time faculty member, to construct it. But here was a chal- lenge that appealed to both my love of projects and my ego, and I readily agreed to double my teaching workload.
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