You are informed that your grade for the entire semester will depend on one exam, graded anonymously, given at the end of the term. After a brief but somewhat ominous moment of silence, the professor looks up from his class list and calls out, Mr. Chase? (Although our set of classroom teachers contains a number of professors of color and white female professors, it is still the case that the first-year doctrinal classes are predominantly taught by white males. So, we will begin our story using the predominant profile.) Relieved that your last name does not even resemble Chase, you relax momentarily into your chair while the unfortunate Mr. Chase sits up anxiously, book opened to the first case assigned for the day, and prepares to answer the next question. The professor

I want to begin by trying to figure outlittle bit slowstart by trying to figure out what the lower court decided in Hawkinss case. What became of that?10 And now your legal training begins, for the professor is not starting by asking you to tell the dramatic story of poor young Hawkins, who wound up with a terrible hand after trusting Dr. McGee to give him a 100 percent perfect hand, a good hand. It may be that the details of the evocative plot of this story, or the villainy or pathos of its central characters, were the main things that stuck in your head after reading the case. But here is the professor asking you to worry first about what the lower court did. Why? Who cares? Isnt what we care about here justice? Isnt the main thing whether young Hawkins was screwed over by an incompetent, uncaring, or generally vicious surgeon, and whether our society is going to do something about it? Or is the main issue whether were going to be so hard on

But the professors questions move methodically on, pushing Mr. Chase to dig up more than he ever thought hed have to know about what the lower court did. And you realize that apparently, to the legally trained mind, a core aspect of this case you just read involves the layers of authority that come into play

For example, in this case, it seems important that the text was written by an appellate court (i.e., not by the judge who actually oversaw the trial, but by a judge or group of judges whose job it was to review the decisions made by trial courts). This may not have been anything that particularly struck you in reading the case initially, and you begin to wonder if you were really cut out to be a lawyer. When Mr. Chase hesitantly volunteers that the lower court decided in favor of the plaintiff (which would be young Mr. Hawkins), the professor wants to know in what respect this was true. Mr. Chase then explains that they decided the plaintiff could get damages (translation: money), but that they reduced the damages. This sounds like a pretty specific response to you, but the professor interrupts and gets very picky about who they are. It turns out that the they who awarded the damages was the jury, but the they who reduced the damages was the judge. This seems