Having fought to perfect an assignment for 4 consecutive days with less than 20 hours of sleep, and after receiving an unsatisfied grades from my midterm exam, I was frustrated and tired.I lost contacts with friends and families. I lost contacts with televisions and movies. I lost contacts with me in the mirror.
No time to complain, I went home and finished dinner in 20 minutes. I cleaned myself in 10 minutes, fired emails in 10 minutes. I tore down and reassembled my assignment in 1.5 hour, killed Civil Procedure in 1.5 hour and terminated Criminal law in 1 hour.
Finally, at 12PM, the last three torts cases lies on my desktop, awaiting my torture. My focus is gone, and my bed is seductively crying for my attendance.
I do not complain hard work nor busy schedule, but I do not accept time in waste. My busy schedule forces me to run, but does not force me to feel. I have learned to artfully pinpoint and copy the knowledge within the text, but had no time to learn by heart or to establish my own thoughts.
Yes I learned discipline and persistence. Yes I learned hard working and being efficient. But I couldn't feel the passion of knowledge nor the joy of intellectual challenges. I become a test machine without fires in the eyes.
With no choice, I reluctantly picked up the Torts text book again, and sailed to the end of the day... Another hour passed and the routine seems never ending...
Alas, the third Torts case saved my day.
There is no happy story in Torts, and this one is one of the saddest. A young girl was burned in a house fire because of the malfunction of a heater. Forty percents of the infant's body were burned and her fingers wobbled together as the result of the melt of skin. She will have no hair and cannot talk normally. Her stomach will forever show the hand print of her mother, who died in the fire trying to protect her. She will have to go through 27 surgeries for the next 2 years. And if she makes it to juvenile, surviving inflammation and risk of cancers, she will begin to face rejections, stares and disgusts from people who she cares or who she doesn't care. She may never marry, and may never raise a kid and have a family.
Always I ask myself to empathy the characters in the case. This tragedy touched me as well as the judge who wrote the opinion deeply. I cannot imagine how the judge feels when he was listening the case, as much as he cannot envisage what the young girl will face in the rest of her life.
At the end of the case the jury awarded the girl 2 million dollars to recover what can never be recovered. The case ended at the end of page 523. The girl went on to her battle and the judge called in the next sad story.
And a first year law student who was losing faith, learned how fortunate he is.
