A lot of first year law school is about learning how to read a case, and, as we say, learning how to think like a lawyer. And some torts cases are especially good at that because the facts are often very vivid and there can be kind of difficult issues in trying to wrestle with certain legal concepts. For both conceptual and historical reasons, I think there's some value in starting with intentional torts. The cases are more straightforward in some ways, the issues tend to be a little more straightforward, and historically, to some extent, the common law system of torts grew out of intentional torts, the providing of remedies for forceful or purposeful harms inflicted by a defendant on a plaintiff. So intentional torts are harms that are done where one acts with the purpose or aim of causing such a harm. Even though intention might seem kind of straightforward, it does turn out, as students usually encounter in the first few weeks of law school, that even something as seemingly straightforward as intent in tort law can be subject to some variation and debate and dispute. At the core of it is this idea that you have the elements that a plaintiff has to allege and prove. And so in the tort of battery, for example, it's: that defendant acted with the intention of causing harmful or offensive contact, and that defendant's act did cause harmful or offensive contact. And so, that element of intent is central to the plaintiff's case for establishing the tort of battery. For instance, in the area of intentional torts, a famous case is Vosburg vs. Putney, a 19th century Wisconsin case involving one school boy kicking another school boy. But the question is, does that constitute a battery, as has been traditionally understood, if it was the case that the defendant boy, didn't intend to cause harm to the plaintiff, and so that's a case where the Wisconsin Supreme Court kind of grapples with this question of what does it mean to intend to cause a harm or offense, and they end up siding with the plaintiff in Vosburg vs Putney saying that even if the defendant didn't mean to cause the harm, the fact that he acted impermissibly in kicking his friend is sufficient to give rise to a battery cause of action. So that's an example of how you have some vivid facts, you have a seemingly simple set of legal issues, but turns out much more complicated than you think it is, and it's a great way of learning how there can be ambiguity, even in something as seemingly straightforward as the intent element of battery.