Change of Command

By Yungmoon, 2E

It's not often you walk into your Contracts class and see the Dean of the school standing at the front of the room. Dean Scott, Associate Dean for Faculty, normally teaches our class. However, in a startling turn of events, we discovered that she was human, and that she had fallen victim to the flu that swept across sunny Southern California.

So there stood Dean Victor Gold, Dean of Loyola Law School, prior CBS news legal analyst, in all of his glory, ready to impart his knowledge to a group of evening students with a mere four months of legal training.

Contracts is the hardest of the first-year courses for me. It isn't always exciting, it isn't always tangible, and frankly I find the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) that governs transactions for tangible goods to be as dense as rice pudding that has been left out overnight. Suffice it to say, I was skeptical that Dean Gold could effectively whittle down the material to a comprehensible level.

The UCC Statute of Frauds requires certain types of contracts to be evidenced by a writing in order to hold the contract enforceable. There is a myriad of exceptions and requirements to consider in a Statute of Frauds analysis. In other words, Dean Gold had his work cut out for him, especially considering it was 9:00pm on a Monday. However, Dean Gold was up for the challenge.

Besides thoroughly explaining the statute in a manner that showed his understanding of every nuance of the section, Dean Gold was accessible. He was funny, he asked students to participate, and he played along with every hypothetical we threw at him. For someone who is in charge of over 1,000 students and has to think on a macro scale, I was impressed with his ability to switch gears and to put his micro thinking cap on, especially under such short notice. Anyone would have found it reasonable had he canceled the class or asked another professor to step in, but Dean Gold proved he is not above spending his Monday night with a group of first-year law students.