What did I tell you?

World's Oldest Person Dies...again

The curse is unstoppable! Watch out, Yone Minagawa!

Couldn't he try a little harder?

The trouble with being named the world's oldest person is that it carries with it a curse...

World's Oldest person dies at 115

The Devil's Law Dictionary - Entry one

So far in Torts, we have spent the bulk of our time learning about negligence. One key aspect of negligence law, as we are learning, is determining whether the defendant owed a duty of care to the plaintiff. In Canada, there is a test (known variously through time and space as the Anns, Anns/Kamloops, Kamloops, and Cooper tests - for reasons that I will not get into) for determining whether such a duty exists. It is a two-step procedure, the first step (essentially) being to assess if a duty exists, and the second being whether there are any policy reasons why this duty should be negated. One such reason is 'indeterminate liability' - basically, the court says "if we let you sue, even though the defendant owed you a duty, there is nothing stopping just about anybody from suing, so you can't do it."

The lesson for the Devil's Law Dictionary:

Indeterminate Liability (n) - If you are not going to fulfill a duty, make sure you owe it to as many people as possible.

Second-half kickoff

Well, Christmas break is over - gone are the days of the things that truly matter; the three F's - family, friends, forgetting everything learned in fall semester...and it's back to class today.

A fresh breath of air in Constitutional law today; instead of having a lecture, we were eased into the semester with our meager exam marks (which thankfully didn't add a fourth 'F' to the list enumerated above) and suggestions on how to improve upon them come April. It's still better than continually re-organizing a warehouse, which is what I spent the past three weeks doing.

Well, it wasn't that bad - I wasn't feeling all that great when I wrote the Constitutional exam - I was content with it after leaving the exam, but I hadn't hit my exam-writing stride (which lost wind by the time I wrote Property) yet. So, to get a reasonably above-average mark seems OK, even if it only sets me up for disappointment when the rest of them roll in over the next little while.

The next week will be spent trying to learn how to read law books again, as well as trying to recapture a fragment of the greatness that I firmly believed that I possibly possessed going into the second week of exams. Then, it's only 12 more weeks of class until April exams!