My Second Contracts Exam

I'm pretty sure my torts teacher just trolled the entire class.

Troll: to purposefully do something WAY outside the bounds of reasonableness just to laugh as others freak out about it.

Our three-hour Torts exam is meant, like all of our other exams, to allow us to show what we learned over the course of the semester in order for the teacher to allocate to us 100% of our grade in the class.  I imagine that's how that works, at least.  So imagine our surprise when we opened up our exam to find one (1) two-page question entirely about contracts.  To clarify: a question for a torts exam in which absolutely no one gets hurt or claims to get hurt.  Two people got up to ask whether we were given the correct exam.  Everyone else just looked sort of dazed.  When we received word that it was indeed the right exam, we proceeded to do the greatest making-stuff-up session ever.

Marginally reasonable things I said in my exam: there could have been, according to the question, a very weak argument for a tort involving economic harm (which we studied for about five minutes).  I took that and ran with it.  I also introduced a lot of "well, if someone HAD gotten hurt, then..." hypotheticals, even though the question did not ask for any such things.

Completely unreasonable things I said in my exam:  I claimed that a blueprint was a consumer product which consumers expected to be able to "operate" safely.  I offered up the possibility for a strict liability regime based on the negligent product design of blueprints.  I said (in my most passive-aggressive moment) "I would cite the cases which allow for voiding a contract in this case, but those cases are in my outline for Contracts."  I made arguments for affirmative duty (which you make when dealing with strangers who are not in privity of contract) in a case in which everyone was in contract with one another, simply because I had run out of other things to say.

At one point I had deleted everything else on my exam and started a new answer about negligent infliction of emotional distress on students by giving an unforeseeable and nonsensical exam.  At another point I had written down "if this question seriously wouldn't be better answered through a contracts analysis, then please please fail me out of this class because I obviously missed something hugely important."  I deleted both of those, which is probably for the best.

Afterwards the entire class got together just to assure themselves that everyone else felt the same way.  Even the most hardened gunners in the class were perplexed and admitted to just making up terrible theories in order to fill pages.  So on the one hand, I guess it is good that we are all in the same boat.  On the other hand: what happened???

No real time to think about that now, though- I've got Civil Procedure to study for.