From Scott Turow's legendary One L to the halls of Moritz, the study of contracts has a reputation as daunting. What is it about contracts that law students find so challenging?

"Why might Scott Turow (and John Jay Osborne in Paper Chase) have depicted contracts professors as fiendish and sadistic, a sentiment shared by altogether too many students? Paradoxically, I think because contracts is the most familiar subject to most first-year students. We all make contracts every day. As a result, we tend not to think about how they work, and insofar as we do, we tend not to think through our preconceived notions. A beginning student must therefore both think critically about something that comes without thought and toss out many false conceptions, difficult tasks at best. Contracts is also the most logical and coherent of the first-year subjects – logical in that its results generally flow from a relatively modest set of assumptions, and coherent in that the parts fit together in a particular order. It's thus difficult to know anything about contracts until one knows everything about contracts, a daunting prospect for rookies.

And, of course, all contracts professors are fiendish and sadistic."

Larry Garvin
Lawrence D. Stanley Professor of Law