With the possible exception of attending committee meetings, grading final exams is the most boring part of a professor's job; that - plus recovering from ankle surgery- is what I have been doing the last few days. Tis definitely the season to be jolly.
Every once in a while, however, the monotony is broken by a hilarious exam blooper. In my Property class, I always cover the Calabresi-Melamed framework which distinguishes property rules, liability rules and inalienability rules.
This year, the students seem to have grasped it well. However, I did read one exam that repeatedly referred to "the Bernard Melamud" theory. What (other than my inadequate teaching, of course) could have led the student to make this mistake? I eventually figured out that he or she must have confused Calabresi and Melamed with novelist Bernard Malamud. Malamud did write some books where legal issues feature prominently; his most famous novel, The Fixer, is a fictionalized account of the trial of Mendel Beilis, a famous anti-Semitic "blood libel" case in czarist Russia. Unfortunately, however, Malamud - unlike Jane Austen - didn't focus much on property law and wasn't much of a law and economics scholar.
It's a minor mistake by the student and one that I didn't penalize much; but humorous nonetheless.
UPDATE: As commenter JonathanM points out, Malamud did in fact write a property law-related novel, The Tenants. Perhaps the student had read this book recently, applied a Calabresi-Melamed analysis to to the plot and began to conflate their theory with Malamud!
Related Posts (on one page):
- Calabresi-Melamed and Bernard Malamud:
- Law in Fantasy Literature:
- Property Law in Russian Literature:
- Property Law in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:
A "melamed" was a Hebrew teacher, sometimes an itinerant. He generally taught elementary-level students the basics, and had considerably less status than more learned types, such as rabbis.
Both Malamud and Douglas Melamed are, I believe, of Eastern European Jewish descent, so there names probably have common origins.
Noted and corrected.
I don't think it's such a terrible wrong to note an exam mistake without naming the person who made the error (whose identity, by the way, is unknown to me as well, due to blind grading). This one was made repeatedly throughout a moderately long essay, so it wasn't merely a random gaffe. Many professors and teachers have noted similar mistakes in articles and blog posts over the years.
He should have won a Nobel prize.
That's because you've been divorced through enough years that you can't relate to the anxiety of 1L exams — let alone the impact your few words could have on a student struggling to find his way during the first semester in law school. Especially the day before Christmas. Nice work.
Your comparison of a blog post (let alone a legal publication) and writing a time-sensitive exam seems too thin to warrant a response.
Take note dear law student. I still remember the very first sentence I wrote in a law school exam: "The UCC wood apply. . ." This stellar beginning has had no impact on any part of my legal career.
1. These students aren't 1Ls, but 2Ls.
2. I was a student as recently as 6 years ago.
3. Lots of people are harshly criticized for many things BY NAME in online publications, including on the day before Christmas.
My only point of concern is that law students have the understandable but unfortuante propensity to obsess over the smallest errors, magnifying them out of all objective proportion, until they see their exam grade. Somewhere, an unfortunate law student will be convinced that he would have got an A in Property if he had only brushed up on the names of Second Circuit judges.
John T. Sapienza, Jr., a critical designer who is relatively unknown, in spite of his contributions to D&D and Runequest, was on law review at George Washington and had a career in the IRS.
But FRPGs seem to draw in, as designers, some varied political types.
This is not an unreasonable point. Perhaps I should have been more careful. However, I don't even know yet whether the person will get an A anyway (as the scale is not quite done yet), and in any event it's highly unlikely that a small error like this will make a decisive difference on an exam.
I should also make clear that this is not a matter of knowing the names of all the 2nd Cir. judges. It's a matter of knowing the name of a fundamental theory in this field that you have to know in order to understand major debates over a variety of property issues. As a grading matter, it's not much different from a situation where I would have to penalize a Property student for not knowing what a "fee simple" or a life estate is. Like Calabresi-Melamed, these are insignificant esoteric terms to laypeople, but very important for students who wanted to be educated in the subject to know.