What’s interesting is that the way law schools use the ‘Socratic method’ today is pretty different from how Socrates actually used it. Socrates asked slow, careful questions to help people think deeply and examine their assumptions. It was a patient, reflective process.

In modern classrooms, especially with cold calling, the pace is much faster. Students have to answer right away, often before they’ve had time to fully think things through. The idea is that the pressure pushes them into deeper thinking afterward, but it’s a very different rhythm from the original method.

The modern version still works as a teaching tool, but it works in a different way, it uses quick questions to trigger deeper thought, whereas Socrates used slow questions to guide deeper thought.

This just triggered my anxiety

How were these two students so well prepared? Does anyone know if they were assigned to do the Case Notes beforehand?

Great contracts professor! Im from a diff state but love watching his lessons on YouTube!

This was awesome. I want to go to law school!

Amazing quality

This is what quality content looks like.

Your editing is getting better every video.

great class

Cold calling is an art, thanks for sharing!

Looking forward to the next one.

under lucy v zehmer the contract was deemed legitimate by the appellate court. and more to the point, follow.up conversations confirmed this. in my case I entered into a contract and Emily followed up in email that parts of the lease were applied against me, but didn't and chose not to apply the rest of the lease that protected me against the other parties. edward signed a signature on the lease violations they committed showing follow up communication and their own verification of the lease as valid and enforceable. So they cannot argue the protection clauses were a joke, understated or misinterpreted. therefore, they confirmed the validity of my claims and show active breach of contract.

excellent content! thanks for putting this up

Very illustrative, thanks for sharing

This case is featured in the JD Next course. A new course that may be used at some schools to gain entry.

Awesome work

That s an easy thumbs up.

The comments passed the vibe check.

This is interesting but you left out some of the issues raised by the procedural dynamics of the case.  To begin with, legal theory usually talks in terms of two categories: a "subjective" (what was actually in the mind of the actor) and "objective" (the "truth").  But this formulation leaves out the "intersubjective" category ("what would we say about something?").  Although the rule here is justified on the grounds of its being "objective," the actual formulation of the rule is intersubjective: would a reasonable person see this as a valid offer?  Besides there being a gap between the justification of the rule and the rule's actual formulation, there is more importantly the question of the procedural dynamics.  In the usual case, when a rule calls for an assessment of whether something is "reasonable," that is a question of "fact" or a "mixed question" for the jury.  Here, the court treats it as a question of "law" for the courts.  That raises the issue of why we are departing here from the typical practice, which doesn't seem to be addressed.  One possibility is that we might think leaving it to the jury would lead to more random outcomes or perhaps to jury favoritism of certain plaintiffs or defendants.  But as shown in Lucy, judges can also disagree, leading to random outcomes.  There is also an interesting implication from the ruling in Lucy: since the rule is whether a reasonable person would see this as a valid offer, and the trial judge was overruled, the appellate court is necessarily saying that the trial judge is an "unreasonable person"(!), at least in this instance.  (In the edited version of Lucy in the casebook I used there is no mention of the trial judge, the trial judge's ruling, etc.  The only clue you get is that at the end it says "Reversed" and since appellate courts can't reverse juries, it must have been the trial judge's ruling.  Perhaps they were trying to avoid this embarrassment).  What we are left with here is a rule that treats an assessment of facts (a "mixed" question, in the lingo) as a question of law, which, being a question of law, means appellate courts owe no deference to the trial judge's assessment.  I think that is the issue here that needs to be justified.  I don't want to say that it can't be justified, but it's not at all clear to me what that justification might be.  Assessment of facts is generally thought to be more in the institutional competence of the jury than an appellate court.  There's no reason to think that it would be more "efficient": that would turn on who's on the bench (predominantly judges who lean toward wanting to find contracts vs predominantly judges who don't) rather than on the rule.  Given these peculiarities, it would be interesting to know how Virginia courts have generally been handling these types of cases: the rule of Lucy may well still be good law, but how often are trial judge's rulings overruled on appeal and what is the pattern of those overrulings (e.g., leaning toward finding valid offers or not or, essentially, so fact-specific that no generalization can be made?).  If the latter is the case, that re-raises the fundamental issue of why this is being treated as a question of law for the courts (i.e., it eliminates the rationale that leaving it to the jury would lead to more random outcomes and begs the question of why fact-specific resolutions aren't being left to the finder of fact).

If quality had a face, it would be this video.