I'm not terribly put out by it, because I hate rereading books and I know I would not have gotten much at all out of Dostoyevsky at that age. I read Bulgakov in undergrad after taking a few history courses and loved it. </I>
We read Crime & Punishment in AP English Lit in high school. I definitely got a lot out of it at that age. I am sure I would get more now. But I think reading and rereading certain books throughout life is a journey. You start out with a book and as you get older (and perhaps wiser) you reread books getting more and more out of them. Crime & Punishment is one of those books. So was Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy that we also read.
I'm still a little bitter.
Your professor sounds awful. One of things they taught us in graduate school was only write things about which you have passion. Your topic sounds pretty damn great to me. Hope law treats you better than academia did. Though I left my graduate program too because of what I viewed as the assassination of thought. Essentially history programs had been hijacked by anthropology.