Weird dream about my Contracts professor.

[DeposeTheBoyKing]

I dreamed he was teaching a summer session, which I was taking (God forbid). He was being a total jerk. I asked him a direct question and asked him to answer it, but he said "No" and went to lunch. The only people taking the class were the girl who finished first in our graduating class and me, and she was telling him about her knee surgery (which to my knowledge she's never had) and showing him her scar. I felt very ignored by him. He's a terrific guy; don't know where this came from. Maybe I need to study Contracts harder for the bar exam! (but I do pretty well on that portion of my study questions).

[RPM]

1. who did you have for Contracts?

I had Madison - whom i now regard with the same cool ambivalence that he seemed to dsiplay toward my section.

[DeposeTheBoyKing]

2. Flechtner

Loved him - one of my favorites. I had Madison for Copyright. Tried his best to make it interesting, but we remained unmoved.

[RPM]

3. i understand completely

Flechtner is a brilliant man and a good lecturer - but, damn, his exams are tough. I had him for sales - i still get shivers at the mention of Magnuson-Moss which, despite being a small portion of the class, was a huge poriton of the exams.

[DeposeTheBoyKing]

4. I remember going into the Contracts exam

I was PETRIFIED - I didn't think I'd spot a single issue! It came out okay. I'm feeling much the same about the bar - I hope to have the same result!

[GalleryGod]

10. My only "Ace" in my 1L . K's !

Loved it ! Loved it !

[GalleryGod]

8. Kingsfield !

" you come to me with your skulls filled with mush..."

[rsdsharp]

5. Being a total jerk was par for the course

for my contracts professor. He hated the phrase "meeting of the minds." One day he came into class with a blender and two containers. One contained pig brains and the other calf brains. He dumped them into the blnder and hit frappe, saying that was the only meeting of the minds he wanted to hear about in his class.

He also had a thing about the statute of frauds. You had to be able to correctly identify the issue in the essay section of his final. If you didn't, you failed. In previous years, he gave the essay section followed by the objective section. While students were working on the objective portion, he'd do a quick scan of the essays. Then he'd walke back into class, write the test numbers of those who had screwed the pooch on the SoF issue on the blackboard, and order them to leave the room because they had already flunked. During the test, in front of the other class members!

The administration put a stop to that little piece of sadism, so he came up with a new wrinkle for my class. He gave us five essay questions, and we were required to write an answer to only four. That set off alarms in my mind that there was more than one SoF question. In fact there were three. Nice guy.

[RPM]

6. holy shit

who is this guy & where does he teach?

what an asshole (although the blender thing was kinda funny...:freak:)

[rsdsharp]

9. His name

was TJ McDonough. He taught at Drake, until he quit in the mid 80's over a dispute with the Dean. I heard he died a few years ago. I didn't grieve. Still, what goes around comes around. TJ wanted nothing in life but to be on the bankruptcy bench. He sought every opening in the Northern and Southern Districts of Iowa for years. But he'd pissed off so many people (both former students and lawyers he dealt with in an of counsel practice) that there was a dedicated underground focused, successfully, on keeping him off the bench.

He was a bully, and not a particularly good teacher. He would berate students, and scream at them constantly while engaging in the "Socratic method." A guy who would become a good friend and study partner was the focus of TJ's wrath on the second day of class. He walked into the lounge later looking like he was in shell shock.

He was the same kind of ass in practice. One of my partners officed next to him when he was an associate at another firm, and TJ was of counsel. He said every phone conversation TJ had was always the same. He would hear TJ's voice getting louder and louder until he would finally scream "Fuck you!" at the other attorney and slam down the phone!

[RPM]

11. real handsome looking fellow...

Long-time law professor Thomas J. McDonough died Nov. 30 in Des Moines.
A native Iowan from Fort Madison, Professor McDonough returned to his home state in 1970 to teach contracts, sales, secured transactions and jurisprudence at Drake.

Professor Robert Hunter remembers his colleague as a teacher who presented a gruff exterior and a compassionate interior. Students feared missing the statute of frauds issue on a Contracts exam, or being assigned the "dictionary person" who had to look up and explain words to the class. But when all was said and done, Hunter said, most students felt they had accomplished something worthwhile in his classes. "He taught many students how to stand up for themselves among their peers. Professor McDonough cared deeply about helping his students become better lawyers."

Professor McDonough received his undergraduate degree in 1960 and his law degree in 1963, both from the University of Iowa. He began his teaching career at the University of South Dakota. In 1967, he received an LL.M. degree from Harvard University, then joined the faculty of the University of Arkansas. In 1970, he became a visiting professor at Drake, and he joined the faculty on a permanent basis the following year. He retired in 1990.

In Des Moines, Professor McDonough was of counsel to the Thoma - now Davis - law firm, and he was a commissioner on the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws.

[rsdsharp]

12. Dictionary person was another little piece of chickenshit.

He started every year with Hawkins v. McGee -- the "Hairy Hand" case from the 1920s, even though it was in the middle of the case book. The case was tried in assumpsit, and TJ knew that the poor soul who was called on to brief the case would use that term. He would immediately ask what it meant, and when the student couldn't define it (or couldn't define it to his satisfaction) they were assigned to be the "dictionary person," which not only meant you had to define terms for the rest of the semester, you had to buy, and then lug around, a Black's 4 days a week.

As for accomplishing something in his class, that was true. On the first day he told you that you would have to teach yourself contract law. He wasn't going to do it for you. I thought a little instruction from the professor in exchage for $20,000 per year wasn't asking too much. In fact, he went to watch Iowa play football in Hawaii in late November, and then took the next week to vacation there, despite the fact that it was the next to the last week of the semester. When he returned, he covered eighty pages a day to get through the case book. We'd previously been doing about twenty.

If this sounds like sour grapes, it's not. I wasn't the dictionary person, and I got the highest grade in the class. I just don't like bullies, and refused to take any other classes from him (where, according to friends who did, he was fairly cordial).

As for the picture (I found the article) that was taken at least 15 years and 50 pounds before I knew him.

[RPM]

13. We started with Hawkins v. McGee

but it was a t the beginning of our book.

htat prof seems like a total douche

[DeposeTheBoyKing]

14. Some things you just never forget.

Pennoyer v. Neff in Process; also International Shoe (I got called on for that on the 4th day of class).

[WeRQ4U]

7. My contracts prof was the best prof I had in law school.

Doug Newell, Lewis and Clark Law School

I ended up taking every single thing that he taught. Secured Transactions, Sales and.........entertainment law. Yeah, that one came in handy.