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BARROW NEWS-JOURNAL
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2021
Opinions
“Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent. ”
- Henry Ward Beecher ~
GUEST COLUMN
Observations from Harvard Law School,
weeks 6-7
Editor’s note: Ryan Miller is a 2017 grad
uate and former valedictorian of Apalachee
High School. He earned bachelor degrees in
chemistry and history and graduated sumnia
cum laude from the University of Georgia in
December 2020 and graduated summa cum
laude with a master of public administration
from VGA in May. He was accepted to Har
vard Law School and recently began classes
there. He is documenting that experience for
the Barrow News-Journal.
WEEK 6
Monday, Sept. 27
•Torts: Qualified Immunity. The
Supreme Court has allowed immu
nity for government officials from
$1,983 unless it is clearly estab
lished their actions violate constitu
tional rights.
•Guest speaker: Jamison v. Mc
Clendon. A district judge spoke to
our class about this specific case and
qualified immunity in general.
•Property: Lateral Support. Land-
owners cannot excavate on their
property in a way that undermines the stability
of their neighbor's land, such as digging below
on a mountain.
•Lesson of the Day: Law and justice are not
always intertwined, and it is up to us to make
sure that they are.
Tuesday, Sept. 28
•Torts: Negligence. You will be liable for the
injuries experienced by a victim if you have a
duty to the victim, you breach that duty, and
your breach causes their injuries.
•Property: Appurtenant Easements. Ease
ments “run with the land” if they are written, if
notice is given at time of purchase, and if origi
nal grantor intended it to pass between owners.
•Harkness Cafe: In addition to other dining
options, HLS offers this cafe which is open for
lunch and offers a robust assortment of food
- from international cuisine to grilled classics.
•Lesson of the Day: Lawsuits provide oppor
tunities for people to pursue legal changes by
enabling the courts to reconsider the current
body of law.
Wednesday, Sept. 29
•Civil Procedure: Specific In Personam PJ.
If not general, courts assess on a case-by-case
basis whether a state has personal jurisdiction
over a defendant based on certain criteria.
•Torts: Duty (in Negligence). A relationship
to another that requires you to exercise rea
sonable care while conducting a potentially
dangerous activity so you do not cause them
injury.
•Contracts: Battle of the Forms. When mer
chants use different forms when completing a
transaction of goods, courts do not view con
flicting terms in the forms as counteroffers.
•Clinics at HLS: Harvard Law School of
fers numerous opportunities for 2Ls and 3Ls
to acquire real experience representing clients
in the Boston area while earning class credit.
•Lesson of the Day: Be sure to check the
weather before going to bed because you just
might wake up to a freezing room the next
morning.
Thursday, Sept. 30
•Civil Procedure: Calder Effects Test. A
state can have PJ if there was an intentional
act directed toward a state with knowledge that
the majority of injury would take place in the
state.
•Contracts: Contract Modifications. Modifi
cations are usually only allowed when unfore
seen circumstances arise that seriously impact
the agreement or parties agree to a new con
tract.
•Classroom conversations: Our section gath
ered with an HLS representative to reflect on
how we felt about law school so far and what
we might want to improve moving forward.
•Mississippi Delta Project: MDP is a student
practice organization focused on promoting
economic development in the Delta region
through collaborative projects with local lead
ers.
•Lesson of the Day: Just because people
have different reasons for wanting to do the
same thing does not mean they cannot excel at
doing it together.
Friday, Oct. 1
•Civil Procedure: Purposeful Availment. The
Supreme Court tends to permit personal juris
diction over a corporation if it makes purpose
ful efforts to benefit from a state.
•Contracts: Uncontrived Warnings. Courts
will enforce contract modifications created by
one party threatening not to work unless un
foreseen circumstances that arise are account
ed for.
•TD Garden: music concert. TD Garden, the
Boston arena, hosts Celtics and Bruins games,
in addition to special events such as concerts
for musical artists.
•Civil Rights-Civil Liberties: Subcite.
CRCL is another Harvard student-run jour
nal, which publishes current legal scholarship
based on ideas around civil rights and liber
ties.
•Lesson of the Day: Courts cannot grant
injunctions for service contracts - forcing
someone to work - because that would equate
to involuntary servitude.
WEEK 7
Monday, Oct. 4
•Torts: Premises Liability. Land-
owners have a duty to take reason
able steps to protect others on their
land, but the duty varies with wheth
er others are invitees, licensees or
trespassers.
•Property: Covenants. These are
limits on how you can use your own
land with respect to your neighbors
or former owners, such as protecting
free flow of light, air, or water.
•Hastings Basement: movie night.
At a classmate's suggestion, we
gathered unofficially in the base
ment area of Hastings Hall (one of the dorms)
and watched the movie Knives Out.
•Lesson of the Day: Grown-ups make mis
takes. like a bank forgetting to make someone
sign their own mortgage so it is not legally
valid.
Tuesday, Oct. 5
•Torts: Duty to Third Parties. The Tarasoff
duty is a specific example where a person’s
special relationship to another owes them a
duty to an unrelated third party.
•Property: Assessing Covenants. Courts
will review covenants on how reasonable they
are or on how they impact the general public
to determine if they are valid and should be
enforced.
•Reading Group: Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind. We discussed the legal impli
cations and moral concerns if it was possible
to erase traumatic memories.
•Lesson of the Day: How do we remember
the past, through personal or social memory?
Can the two be separated?
Wednesday, Oct. 6
•Civil Procedure: Venue. Venue is the dis
trict within a state where a case is heard, and it
can be determined by where the resident lives
or where the facts of the case took place.
•Torts: Breach of Duty. If a duty is estab
lished in negligence, the courts determine the
expected standard of care for the duty, and the
jury determines if that standard was breached.
•Contracts: Duress. Duress, which nullifies
a contract made, results from an “improper”
threat which leaves a party with no reasonable
alternative but to agree to the contract terms.
•Equal Democracy Project: Policy Commit
tee. A subset of EDP students work closely
with professors and professionals to complete
reports on the current voting and voting rights.
•Lesson of the Day: Tort and criminal law
have different goals - tort law focuses on
compensating victims while criminal law is
generally about punishing wrongdoing.
Thursday, Oct. 7
•Civil Procedure: Transfer of Venue. This
occurs when a defendant files a motion to
move from one federal court (the transferor
court) to another federal court (the transferee
court).
•Section meeting: A member of a state’s
DA office spoke to us about his career path
from law school and the importance of being
involved in state government.
•Contracts: Nondisclosure. For casually ac
quired information, sellers have a duty to dis
close it to potential buyers if it significantly
affects the value of the good, especially with
houses.
•Legal Research and Writing: Secondary
sources. When you are conducting a research
project, it is best to start with secondary sourc
es to get a feel for the scholarship.
•Lesson of the Day: Even judges take a
spooky liking for ghost-related puns, see the
opinion from Stambovsky v. Ackley (1991).
Friday, Oct. 8
•Civil Procedure: Removal. This motion
transfers a case from state to federal court,
dictated by the rules set out in the federal stat
ute 28 U.S.C. §1441.
•Contracts: Duty to Read. People have a
general duty to read the terms of contracts, so
that they know what they are signing up for -
but there are some exceptions.
•Cambridge Common: Section picnic. Last
weekend, my section mates and I met up at
this park right beside campus and had a pic
nic, playing games like Spikeball and Catan.
•Lesson of the Day: Some contract terms
can be so ridiculous that they will not be en
forced, even if you sign it voluntarily, like giv
ing away your first-born child.
ryan
miller
Time to tune out politics
We were at a social event recently
when an older woman came up and
introduced herself. When she learned
Alex and I are from Georgia, she
perked up.
“I’m a patriot,” she said. “It's a
shame what happened in Georgia, but
we’re going to fix it.”
Dumbfounded, I didn’t know what to
say. The event was purely social, noth
ing to do with politics in any remote
way.
Yet, this woman felt com
pelled to immediately launch
into a political commentary
with two strangers she had
just met.
I’ve thought a lot about
that interaction since it hap
pened. It says something
about our culture, something
that is very troubling.
•••
I suppose that politics and
culture have always been
somewhat entwined. Polit
ical power has often been
used to enforce various kinds of social
conformity, such as the Jim Crow laws
that were enacted in the South as a way
to preserve a racial division following
the abolition of slavery. In the 1960s,
the youth counter-culture movement
blended liberal political views (an
ti-Vietnam War, pro-voting rights, etc.)
with a new culture of music, clothing
and styles.
The mixing of culture and politics
has been seen in other ways as well.
Work culture has historically inject
ed itself into the political sphere via
unions. Today, that has morphed into
high-tech firms like Tesla, Facebook
and Apple being at the center of nation
al debates over politics.
Religion has also often overlapped
with politics. Historically, black
churches were at the center of the civil
rights movement, an injection of reli
gious culture into the political sphere.
Today, some conservative white
churches are involved in anti-abortion
and other political movements.
Given that history, why am I so trou
bled about today’s political and cultural
mix?
•••
It’s because so many people today
in the U.S. have crossed a line with
their political and cultural views. A lot
of people, like the woman we met at
that social gathering, now define them
selves largely by their political views
and little else.
That’s a historic change in our na
tion's culture. In the past, people might
have different political views, but still
shared a lot of common ground in other
areas of their lives. Politics was a much
smaller part of how we defined our
selves in the past.
Today, it feels like everything we
do and say is political, or has political
overtones.
That thought might seem strange
coming from a newspaper editor who
has covered and written about politics
for the past four decades. Much of what
I do grows out of the political sphere. I
often get asked about issues of the mo
ment.
But although my work keeps me en
twined with the political world, I don't
define myself based on my political
views. I'd like to think that I'm more
than just the sum of how I vote, or what
I write.
I like dogs and cats. I like getting
eggs from our chickens and quail
each evening. I like today's folk music
and rock-and-roll from the 1960s and
1970s. I like to travel and discover how
other people live. I like hoppy IPA beer.
I enjoy reading about Appalachian his
tory. I like to hike.
My world is more than just the poli
tics I write about. If I met someone new
and they asked me to describe myself,
my political views wouldn't be in the
top 10 comments.
•••
Yet that isn’t the case for so many
Americans. On both the left and the
right, politics has become the center of
the universe and the defining aspect of
personhood.
You see this in a lot of different ways.
There are subdivisions in Texas that
appeal to conservatives to move there
and become residents. Liberals flock to
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urban areas and college communities.
We are starting to segregate ourselves
in where we live, not just on our jobs,
but also based on our political views.
In religion, some evangelical church
es have turned away from faith and to
ward promoting politics as a means to
an end. Abortion is part of that, but in
recent years the influence of politics has
infiltrated churches on other issues as
well, something we saw a lot of during
the Trump presidency.
And in more recent
months, we've seen health
care and the issues over
masking and vaccines for
Covid become little more
than political debates, the
science be damned.
Just about every aspect of
our daily lives has become
politicized. Friends and fam
ily have been divided over it.
•••
Magnifying that is the
pressure from both the left
and right to pick a side.
Moderates who have a mixture of be
liefs are no longer welcome to any par
ty. You have to be hardcore or get out
of the way.
Republicans who have moderate
views are derisively called “RINOs.”
Democrats who don’t tow the left-wing
progressive line are harassed.
Extremism has become mainstream
and those of us who hold more com
plex, moderate political views are
shunned by an “if you’re not for us
you’re against us” mentality.
That has spread beyond just the polit
ical sphere and into our general culture.
A lot of people no longer define them
selves by their hobbies (golfer, UGA
Bulldog) or by geography (Southern
er, Georgian) or their work (engineer,
carpenter, musician), but rather by their
political affiliation (Republican. Dem
ocrat, conservative, liberal.)
•••
There have been a lot of times I've
covered local government meetings and
aside from the officials and the staff. I
would be the only person present at the
meeting. I used to think people should
care more about their government and
what it does.
But now I think our nation cares way
too much about politics.
We’ve become a nation obsessed by
politics and gripped by an unfathom
able mob mentality. Naked propagan
da, stuff that is so obviously fake and
false that it deserves to be laughed at,
gets serious attention by a large seg
ment of people.
Our political intensity has become
so deep that we’ve lost the ability to
think clearly. It’s as if large swaths of
the nation have been brainwashed and
become little more than robots pro
grammed to spout the same phrases
over and over. That’s true for both lib
erals and conservatives, Democrats and
Republicans.
•••
It’s time Americans get group thera
py for this obsession with politics.
We need to turn off the social media
and news channels. Go outside and
play golf with people who don’t share
our personal political views. Read a
book. Go see the new James Bond
movie. Throw a stick for your dog to
fetch. Drive to a national park and take
a hike. Go to a Braves game.
We need to rediscover that our lives
are bigger and deeper and richer than
just the sum of our political views.
Politics is a part of life, but it isn’t
everything.
Mike Buffington is co-publisher of
Mainstreet Newspapers. He can be
reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.
The Barrow News-Journal
Winder. Barrow County. Ga.
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Mike Buffington Co-Publisher
Scott Buffington Co-Publisher
Scott Thompson Editor
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