I spent some time studying Holmes and Frank in college and entered this first year with realist thought in the back of my mind. I was anxious to see how successfully the modern discipline of law was able to view itself not just as a logic system, but a social institution. At first, I was pleasantly surprised by the degree to which realist thinking was evident in many of our first year courses. My contracts class proceeded almost entirely on the idea that a contract was a choice between a penalty and a performance. My property professor rarely engaged the meaningless formalist distinctions of old common law property cases. Instead, he sarcastically kept track of “judge tricks,” techniques for creating a veil of logic around the simple imposition of a policy preference. This semester in torts, we spend ten minutes on the economic theory of torts for ever one spent directly on black letter law.