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Unrequited Love of the Law
Teaching law can be a lot of fun, particularly to undergraduates. They are all over the game at first: here are your facts and over here is a law. Apply the latter to the former and say why.
No es un problemo. You can do this if you can ride a bicycle and probably if you can’t. It’s amusing but not difficult.
But then you throw sharks in the fishbowl of the class discussion with “what if?” As the discussion goes on, the hypotheticals get more and more “out there.”
There’s a famous tort case where railroad A is being sued for setting fire to a farmer’s crops back in the steam engine days. The case law then held the railroad strictly liable for fire escaping from its engines and that makes it an easy case that ought not even go to trial. The railroad should just pay for the destroyed crops.
But, but, but….what if, on an adjacent track, an engine from railroad B also set fire to the same farmer’s crops. A rule of law would develop to deal with that in a just manner, allowing the farmer to get paid while the railroads squabble about who owed how much, but that rule of law did not exist at first. In law, time travel is an invaluable teaching tool.
There comes a time in the hypotheticals game where nothing is going on but the search for a deus ex…
