Good News and Bad News

The exam on Obligations and Contracts is over. And there is good news and bad news.

The good news is: whatever I studied actually came out in the exam in some form or the other. However, the bad news is: one of the topics I didn't study also came out in the exam. This means I can expect casualty in the results.

Anyway, whatever the results, I am particularly interested in what happened as I stuttered to find the proper legal arguments to one problem. I can't help but be self-aware of my thinking process. Although it looked like I was guessing, this time it seemed different. I actually know what I was looking for—that is, I know what the final form of the answer should look like. But I just didn't have the know-how and the building blocks to engineer a complete legal argument.

The problem, I suspect, was due to the fact that I started writing a tentative answer that was neither a conclusion nor something to support a conclusion. It was nothing. And once I started writing, I was practically committed to an "unknown" line of thought hoping to discover the answer if I write enough words. In creative writing, starting anywhere is a perfectly valid technique as the words will likely connect to each other—like what I'm doing now. But when solving a legal problem, the connection between ideas take precedence over the words. "Say what you mean and mean what you say" seems to be the rule governing legal arguments.

Right now, I have a how-to-reason-on-the-fly problem that needs a you-should-follow-this-steps solution. I don't actually know if it is solvable, but I suppose it would be fun to give it a shot and see what happens.

So, for my first attempt, I'm imagining a law student with a specific need. He needs to compose a "legal solution" by starting out with a desired "legal conclusion." He wants a way to extract the building blocks needed to make the "legal solution" valid from the information in the "legal problem" and maybe from stock knowledge of "legal principles". He is willing to buy the "legal reasoning process" that will allow him to reverse engineer a sound "legal solution" directly from the "legal problem" itself. The "legal reasoning process" must, of course, be shown effective against sample specimen "legal problems" and productive within 3-5 minutes of reading the "legal problem."

If I am the product engineer or designer, how will I go about designing this product? Hmm. This looks like an ideal problem for the subconscious. Anyway, I've got nothing to lose for playing with this problem. Like I said, I find it interesting. And the more I write about it, the more I get curious ... as a Gemini should.

Oh well, I'll take a nap and study later for my Special Penal Laws exam.