Columbia Law Students Go On Location for the Time-Honored Brooklyn Bridge Hypothetical
Rather than teach the famous exercise from a classroom, Columbia Law School contracts professor Eric Talley took his students across the iconic bridge — and gave them an opportunity to litigate a contract dispute over donuts before a famed federal judge.
October 31, 2021 at 03:50 PM
2 minute read
Legal EducationA favorite exercise for contracts instructors is the Brooklyn Bridge Hypothetical, which is intended to illustrate the concept of unilateral contracts. This semester, Columbia Law Professor Eric Talley and Julian Arato, a Brooklyn Law School professor who is visiting faculty at Columbia Law, had a novel idea for how to walk his students through the hypothetical — why not take the 1Ls, some of whom are new to New York, on a field trip to the actual Brooklyn Bridge? The famous hypothetical, cooked up more than a century ago by law professor I. Maurice Wormser, goes like this: Party A offers Party B $100 to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, but during Party B's sojourn, Party A revokes the offer. Does Party B have any rights against Party A? On a picturesque Thursday morning, Talley and Arato offered their 1Ls donuts and coffee to cross the bridge, starting on the Brooklyn side. But about three-quarters of the way across, they retracted the offer. "'If you have any complaints about this, the courthouses are on the Manhattan side of the bridge,'" Talley told the disappointed students. "'So you can just take this up with the judge.'" They marched on to Foley Square, where Southern District of New York Judge Jed Rakoff awaited the parties for oral arguments in the donut dispute. Ruling from the bench in Students v. Talley et al., Rakoff, an adjunct professor at Columbia Law, found for the plaintiffs, awarding specific performance of the donuts and coffee and denying defendants' motion for a stay of judgment pending appeal. "We were stuck doling out donuts and coffee," Talley said.
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