Courses

Examines the Formative Era of Islamic Law, through its sources and methodologies. Examines the Established Era of the Schools of Law including differences between Sunni and Shiite Islamic Law. Examines human rights, terrorism, political Islam, women's rights and rights of religious minorities, criminal law, and finance law, and the growing role of fundamentalism in these areas. Examines the relevance of Islam and Islamic law in today's world.

The counseling and legal representation of older persons and their representatives. Topics may include: legal aspects of health and long-term care planning, public benefits, surrogate decision making, legal capacity, the conservation, disposition, and administration of older persons' estates, the implementation of their decisions concerning such matters, and the broad ethical issues of representing clients in this field of practice.

In today's globalized world, lawyers are increasingly likely to encounter issues involving foreign employment. The course will provide substantive knowledge about foreign employment law and its relation to American law, as well as a comparative framework to assess the relative merits of the American approach to employment law.

Examines past and present employee benefits and compensation practices among private and public employers. Covers ERISA and defined benefit, defined contribution, and welfare benefit plans; equity awards granted by corporations; equity awards granted by LLCs and partnerships; nonqualified deferred compensation and Section 409A of the IRS; golden parachutes and Sections 280G and 4999 of the IRC. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law (LAWS) students only.

Concerns domestic and International regulation of property that expresses group identity and experience. Organized around traditional categories of property (real, personal, and intellectual), the course covers historic preservation, archeological resources, art and museum law, with attention to indigenous people's advocacy on burial sites, traditional lands, ceremonies, music, symbols, ethnobotany, genetic information, and language. May satisfy upper-level writing requirement. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law (LAWS) students only.

Explores special topics in law. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law (LAWS) students only.

Provides an introduction to energy law and regulation in the United States. Covers basic principles of rate regulation and public utilities, the division of jurisdiction between federal and state governments, and the key federal statutes and regulatory regimes governing natural gas, electricity, and nuclear power. Focuses on the basic federal frameworks for natural gas and electricity regulation, with an emphasis on understanding the messy and uneven transition to wholesale competition in these sectors and, in the electricity context, the experience with state restructuring and retail competition. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law (LAWS) students only.

Equips students to deal effectively with experts, whether as consultants or as adverse witnesses, and to enable the identification of a quantitative issue. Helps students to become multi-dimensional in quantitative literarcy. Enables students to be comfortable reading statistical arguments, performing basic analyses, writing about statistics, expressing quantitative ideas in graphs, questioning an expert, and understanding the power of computer programming.

This course of seven 100-minute classes aims to present legal reasoning skills crucial to the crafting and criticism of legal arguments. The classes will cover seven topics: rules and standards, the art of the legal distinction, dealing with legal contradictions, facts and framing, level of abstraction, baselines, and legal interpretation.

Offers an in-depth look at research resources and methods. Includes sources from the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of federal and state government; research in topical areas such as environmental law, taxation, and international law; and extensive coverage of secondary and nonlaw resources. Covers both print and electronic sources. Students will have several assignments and a final project.

Approaches legal research from a practice-focused perspective using hands-on sessions in the library. Instructs: how to find and use resources specific to a particular practice area; how to evaluate and weigh strengths and weaknesses of the various legal resources available; and, how to use legal resources efficiently. Includes research strategies and methods, primary and secondary resources, and research using library catalogs and Westlaw, Lexis, and other vendors. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law (LAWS) students only.

Advances and improves legal research and writing skills learned in first year. Proposes variety of assignment types across substantive and procedural areas to prepare for experiences as summer associates or new attorneys. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law (LAWS) students only.