More snow! Wow, it's coming down again today, gently but steadily.

Second day of classes, and I have to say: BO-RING. I thought (and had heard) that criminal law and torts would be more interesting than contracts (dear lord, please let it be so) or property (which I liked, actually) or civ pro (the less of which is said about, the better), but judging from the first day of class in both of those subjects, I'm afraid they're not going to be. And there ain't no Santa Claus, either, Virginia.

The concepts are more familiar -- fault, negligence, culpability -- and the subjects of some of the cases will be more sexy -- murder, larceny, etc. -- but the teasing out ad infinitem of what exactly "intent" or "malicious" means is still boring. A nice, brisk 10-minute discussion, I could deal with. An hour and 25 minutes of various interpretations of a concept -- no. There's a lot of debate. I get it. Let's move on.

Our crim professor said as much today: we learn common law (the evolving body of law created by judges and modified by cases) in law school, but in practice, the statutes (created by legislatures) are what count. I always thought I liked school, and maybe it's just the subject, but I find myself longingly remembering the days when I applied skills and knowledge to actual tasks, instead of listening to others go on about the minutiae of legal concepts.

Electives don't start til next week, so I have a luxurious five hours between classes today. Just six pages of reading for torts. Last night my hallmate and I laughed ourselves silly over the fact that it was the first day of class and we were already leaving our reading for the day OF class.

Incidentally, to show you how geeky (not necessarily a pejorative term) my class is: yesterday, the crim prof used an example that involved him lifting an axe to chop a tree, when our civil procedure professor (who's up for tenure) leaped from behind him and forced him to swing it toward our dean. (It was a hypothetical about volition and crime.) He said today that he'd gotten an email from the civ pro prof, asking him why he had her striking the dean. Yes, someone in our class emailed our civ pro prof and told her about the hypo. I don't know if that's geeky, brown-nosey, friendly, or funny. I'm gonna go with funny, with a good shake of geek.

Oh, okay, back to torts.