Week Five, Part 5 - Torts: The Buck $tops Here

On Thursday morning I walk to the Office of Student Accounts in the basement of the Golden Dome. There I pay my school bill for the fall semester: $9,712.00. Ouch!

The clerk behind the counter wears a burgundy scarf and smells like lilacs. On the cupboard of a nearby cubicle is a magnet: “The buck $tops here.” She smiles and asks me what I’m studying.

“Law.”

“Oh!” she says, looking at me with new respect. She stamps the back of my check. Thump.

“That money took me a year to save,” I say.

She sticks my check in a drawer. “Like Ben Franklin said, ‘The best place to put your money is right here.’” She taps her temple.

I get my receipt and hustle across the Main Quad to Torts class. My favorite seat in the back corner is taken, so I slink down to the second row.

With Professor Charles E. Rice back from a week in New York, the volume of work has once again approached unmanageable. Read, read, read. Brief, brief, brief. I can’t keep up.

Rice warns us. “I want two days for review at the end of the semester, so let’s put the mileage on now.”

We fly through Chapter 3: Privileges. It includes the doctrines of consent, implied consent, self-defense, defense of property, and recovery of property.

Professor Rice has a bad habit of picking the students nearest him for Socratic humiliation. Today, though, he is mostly lecturing.

Rice parks on the topic of consent as it relates to medical cases. “The basic proposition in common law is that a competent adult can refuse any type of treatment, even if it's going to save his life. In the old days, though, they never got into intravenous feeding and the issues we see now.”

I look around the room at my 75 classmates. At $10,000 per head, that’s $750,000. We each take seven classes this semester. As a group we’re paying $100,000 in tuition to hear what Rice has to say.

“On the ethical side of the house,” Rice continues, “the general Christian moral teaching and certainly the Catholic position is that you are required to use all ordinary means to preserve your life. Not extraordinary. But once you start to tube feed or get put on machine, then that extraordinary treatment becomes ordinary.”

Let’s see. If there’s 16 weeks in a semester, that makes 32 classes. Throw in a final exam, and you have 33. Divide the $100,000 in tuition by the number of classes. We the students forked over $3,000 for today’s lecture.

Rice says, “Through an advance directive such as a living will, you can state what treatments you want or don’t want. You can put in provisos: ‘If I become incompetent, don't hook me up.’”

I think about the $10,000 I paid today. After grad school I lived in Japan for a year and taught English. I earned $30,000 of which I saved a third. It wasn’t easy. When my friends jetted to Thailand for beach weekends, I drove my (loaned) scooter along the Shimane coast. While they ate on yakitori at pricey clubs, I dined on soba noodles.

“Can a patient consent to his own death?” Rice asks. “On the moral side of the house, no one ever has the right to kill the innocent or kill himself. In the old days, if you committed suicide, they’d forfeit your property and bury you at a crossroads with a stake in your heart.”

What’s the value-added of a degree from Notre Dame Law School? The name? The fame? The ranking? The moral instruction? The personal attention? The far-flung network of loyal alumni? Football weekends? Maybe it’s smarter to attend IU Bloomington at half the cost.

Rice's closing comments pull me out of my daydream. “Put Chapter 3 on ice and think about it," he says. "Next week we’ll start on negligence.”

* * *