Super Lawyers - North Carolina 2012

WHAT WAS YOUR MOST MEMORABLE CLASS IN LAW SCHOOL AND WHY? AS TOLD TO JESSICA TAM

My first-year criminal
law class.

[My professor, Charles Nesson], taught us criminal law by focusing on the distinction between act and omission, which is an important, and difficult, intellectual distinction. He was brilliant and an interesting, engaging teacher, but he could be provocative and, perhaps, outrageous. For example, after managing to offend a number of women in our section by making what they perceived to be sexist remarks, he turned over the teaching of the class to a group of students, resuming control only after much of our section pleaded with him. ( We were, of course, paying to be taught by professors.) He had reasserted his dominance over our section, but he never explained, and we were never sure what lesson we were supposed to have learned from that experience.

During the course of our class, he told us
about—and asked students in our section
to work on—a toxic tort case in Woburn,
Massachusetts, in which he was assisting a
Boston attorney named Jan Schlictmann.
This case ended up being chronicled in the
1995 book A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr,
which was made into a film starring John
Travolta as Schlichtmann.
ALLEN K. ROBERTSON / ROBINSON
BRADSHAW & HINSON, CHARLOTTE, BANKING
My first-year research
and writing course.

[My team] had a brief due and all we had at that point—which tells you about the changes of technology—was a Brother Electric typewriter. We had to do a brief and, from our perspective, it had to be perfect. Any time you found a mistake, you couldn’t erase back more than 16 spaces, [so] you had to start typing the entire page all over again. We typed the brief, stayed up all night, but we got that brief in on time.

ELIZABETH DAVENPORT SCOTT / WILLIAMS
MULLEN, RALEIGH, BUSINESS LITIGATION
Constitutional law.

It was just a fascinating course. It involved history with studying all the older cases that were kind of evolving: what the courts thought of the Constitution and how they applied it to the more modern cases, and how the Supreme Court sometimes had to come up with rulings on issues that just hadn’t been decided. A lot of times there were splits in the decisions and you could understand where the justices were coming from [on] both ends of the cases.