My brand new bizarre and tenuous theory about my Torts professor.

Tonight I got an email from a classmate speculating about whether our Torts professor is a Buddhist, to which I replied something like "Duh! I knew that in week 2. I mean, how many times has he said 'life is suffering'?"

This little discussion prompted me to do some Googling (insert obligatory NSA joke here) along the lines of:

name-of-Torts-professor buddhism
name-of-Torts-professor buddha

In addition to various items regarding said professor and his work (told you so!), this search turned up a brief news item about the trial of someone with the exact same name as Torts professor, back in the 1950s, for some kind of liquor-related tax evasion during WWII. That news item led me to a Federal case cite, and the appeals case on LexisNexis had a partial account of the facts of the case. As near as I can make out, same-name-fellow had been either a bar owner, a bar part-owner, or a supplier of liquor to bars, and had charged the bars and others a cash premium above the official price for liquor. He didn't pay taxes on this premium, he says because it wasn't profit, as he used all of it to pay suppliers black market prices and ensure a steady supply of liquor during those difficult times. He lost the case, with two circuit court appeals and a denial of cert from the Supreme Court.

So of course my new theory is that professor is actually related to tax evasion guy, and that perhaps this was some kind of formative traumatic childhood incident, and may account for professor's current, frequently odd, behavior.

Unfortunately, I can't quite work the Buddhism angle in there...