Fuck This Stupid Rule

Yesterday I spent what felt like an eternity - probably around 6 hours - trying to learn how to apply the Rule Against Perpetuities. Over and over, I thought I had it, but when I got to the next fact pattern I fell on my face again. Admittedly, math is not my strength, and my ability to imagine people dying at age 5 or procreating at age 80 just doesn't cut it. What's wrong with my brain, I thought, why can't I understand this? Then it happened: I realized that I don't have to learn the Rule Against Perpetuities! It's my education, damnit, and I don't give a shit about this stupid rule! I'd rather learn more about the tragedy of the commons or the public trust doctrine than wrap my brain around some legal fiction that all but a handful of jurisdictions have done away with. I think I just might write in my exam that I - along with the vast majority of US jurisdictions - think this is a stupid rule, and that perhaps it's time to strike it from the standard 1L Property syllabus. So what if I get a bad grade in Property? I feel empowered.

-- AnjaHavedal? - 02 May 2009

If you get a bad grade in property, I doubt you will feel empowered.

-- WilliamKing - 03 May 2009

Dear Will: Your comment is an adventure in logic. I did not say that a bad grade in Property would result in my feeling empowered, but rather that feeling empowered to determine the content of my education results in my not caring about a possible bad grade in Property. Also, what's up with the bitterness? If you're going to make a comment like that on the wiki, I think you should explain it. Right now it just comes across as a lame smack in the face.

-- AnjaHavedal? - 03 May 2009

I can't speak for Will's intention to smack or not to smack you in the face, Anja, but I read his comment as acknowledging the reality in which we live: we will all be graded, and there's someone in your class making sure that she knows the rule against perpetuities so she can get those points that you will miss. It doesn't seem fair to reduce that observation to "lame." I think it's great that you came to the conclusion that you either don't care about your property grade or, perhaps more realistically, think that not knowing the R.A.P. will not result in a loss of a critical number of points on the exam. If it were me, I would make a post like this, feel good for an hour, and then realize that I am a Type A perfectionist personality who will not feel comfortable until I have a passing understanding of the course material, and I'd go back to the books. I related to Will's comment not out of bitterness, but because I am aware of that tendency in myself, and the comment seemed to be a good answer to the bright idealism of your first post. (Fortunately, we didn't really cover the rule against perpetuities in my section )

As far as the logic goes, does it really make sense for you to feel empowered at a decision that might result in you feeling less empowered (getting a bad grade)? Unless getting a bad grade would ultimately make you feel more empowered because you owned the bad grade and created it for yourself because you refused to learn something irrelevant.

I have felt all semester as though the real value I'm getting out of this class may not be reflected in my performance. This course, and Eben's influence, may very well help me save myself from an unsatisfying career, in a way I don't think I would have been able/aware enough to do without it. Still, I haven't evolved enough not to care about doing the best I can to understand the material and score well on exams. I admire you if you have. However, if my interactions with classmates are any indicator, one of the things we all do is lament how unprepared we are, and how much we don't care about any of this grading crap, and then we secretly run home and stay up all night adding flowcharts to our outlines. They are color-coded. None of us are very good at being transparent about how much we really do care about this stuff, and I suspect that tendency may be worse in this class where we've discussed at length how stupid and irrelevant the grading system is to our worth and education.

...Finals time is stressful. If you've found enlightenment, Anja, then go with it. It shouldn't matter who is skeptical and who is not.

-- MolissaFarber - 03 May 2009

Anja, I agree that you did not say that a bad grade in property would make you feel empowered. Nevertheless, you did conclude your post with the conclusion "So what if I get a bad grade in Property?" followed by "I feel empowered." My comment wasn't intended to be a slap in the face.

-- WilliamKing - 03 May 2009

• In the first place, Anja, I agree with you that it's a mistake to spend any time in the first-year property course on the rule against perpetuities. For one thing, future interests aren't really a practically important part of learning modern property law: they're better left to a first course in Trusts and Estates. Second, the rule is a minor portion of a larger and more important set of legal ideas that modern property teachers, unless they are legal historians and understand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century developments well, haven't mastered. When I taught property I didn't teach the rule, much less the absurd fertile octogenarian and unborn widow edge case issues. Anyone who wants to learn the rule's context and reasons of development can take English Legal History with me sometime.

• Second, if you needed six hours to understand the rule, you were taught badly. A few simple principles will help:
  1. A remainder, or other future interest, need only be considered with respect to the rule if it presents a "player to be named later" situation. Any example of a future interest that vests on creation, that is, where the holder of the remainder or reversion has a name, you need not trouble yourself about.
  2. If a reversion or remainder doesn't vest immediately, that is, you don't know the name of the person who will get it, ask yourself one question: "Will I know the name of the person who gets this remainder within one existing lifetime?" In other words, is there someone whose decisions during life, or whose dispositions at death, will give me the name? If so, will that person named actually be able to claim that interest (for example, by coming of legal age), within twenty-one years nine months of the end of the life I just named? If so, the remainder or reversion is within the rule. If not, not.
  3. Remember that the reason the rule was adopted in the first place is that it gives a simple answer using a simple algorithm. The rules it replaced, and which were used earlier in the seventeenth century, were more complicated. Law professors in the US in the late twentieth century liked to confuse law students with the rule, because it's as technical as their limited acquaintances with historical English land law got, but the rule itself was seen by the lawyers who made it as, and it operates as, a simplification. The supposedly complex edge conditions are actually just unusual factual settings, which a sensible course of question asking such as I gave above, will neutralize: they're just facts like other facts and they don't matter any more than the more prosaic usual facts do. The "measuring life" for a remainder is always to be found within the language of the relevant grant or other instrument, and the whole thing is simple because it was meant to be simple. The law teachers who pretend it's complicated are just preening.

• Third, you are correct that not knowing how to work the rule against perpetuities will not cause you to get a bad grade in Property. No Property teacher, however insane, could justify making an examination in which future interests, let alone the rule against perpetuities, would be the major issue on which your performance was measured. If you meet a perpetuities-susceptible issue in the exam, just change the facts to avoid the issue and drop a footnote, indicating that you've changed the facts in order to avoid any possibility of triggering the rule. That will show you know the rule is there, and you will get either almost as much credit as you would have gotten the other way, or more, if your teacher has any respect for creative thinking.

• I'm surprised that so much of the conversation here was about the grades, and whether William was dissing you or not (which he surely wasn't), and so little about helping you to understand the rule. Is this more of the "we have to compete against one another and shouldn't be helpful to one another" bullshit?

I don't agree with this last point. After reading a post about how happy Anja is that she's decided she doesn't care about the Rule Against Perpetuities, and she feels empowered by ignoring it, we're supposed to respond by explaining it? I don't mean to make this about me and Will, since our class didn't learn the rule (although admittedly this sounds defensive), but in general, such a response doesn't seem to get at the revelation that motivated Anja's post - namely, she doesn't want to learn something stupid and antiquated, regardless of what it could mean for her grade (which, I agree with you, is probably quite little). - MF

• Well, I'm certainly not criticizing you for not explaining something you didn't learn, and I'm glad there's at least one Property teacher still working around here who can dispense with the rule. But it seems far less counterintuitive to me than to you that a student proclaiming empowerment from not learning is actually seeking reassurance and assistance. I run into that situation fairly frequently around this time of the year, though rarely more than two or three times a day.

It’s funny that Anja’s realization that she doesn’t care about her grades is met with the unquestioned presumption that she does in fact care, but won’t admit it. (Will insists that she does care by assuming that a bad grade will make her feel like a failure; Molissa affirms Will’s “good response” to her “bright idealism” and implies that we all secretly care and just don’t admit it). After a semester in this class spent bandying about the idea that grades are bullshit and have little if any bearing on our development as lawyers or our worth to society, it’s a bit surprising that someone who professes detachment is treated like a self-delusional and naïve idealist. So the more she protests that she doesn’t value what the majority values, the less credible she sounds. Welcome to the loony bin. -- LeslieHannay - 04 May 2009