The First-Year Curriculum
Our first-year curriculum focuses on required courses that provide the essential foundation for the upper-level curriculum. First-year students also choose from among five electives in the spring semester that correspond to our Concentrations.
The centerpiece of our curriculum is the CaseArc Integrated Lawyering Skills Program, an innovative program stretching across the three years of law school. Designed to coordinate experientially based instruction in fundamental lawyering skills – such as interviewing, counseling, fact-gathering, legal research, writing, oral advocacy, and negotiation – with more traditional classroom methods for teaching legal analysis, it creates powerful synergies between our rigorous, classical education in legal theory and our instruction in lawyering, enhancing both areas. When our students graduate, they are uniquely prepared to become leaders in the practice of law, public and community service, and commerce. The program is team-taught; students receive instruction from experts in legal theory and doctrine, legal analysis and writing, clinical methodology, and library and database research. Each member of the team coordinates their particular parts of the course with all the others, so students will have an integrated learning experience – applying the law the way lawyers do.
Fall Semester
- Torts
- Contracts
- Criminal Law
- CaseArc CORE Lawyering Skills I
Spring Semester
- Civil Procedure
- Constitutional Law
- Property
- CaseArc CORE Lawyering Skills II
- Choice of a Perspectives Elective (offered on a rotation):
- Intellectual Property Survey
- Dispute Resolution
- Bioethics and the Law (or other health law course)
- Global Perspectives
- Courts, Public Policy, and Social Change
The Upper-Level Curriculum
Second- and third-year students have wide discretion in selecting their electives. Other than the foundational first-year courses, there are just a few courses required for graduation: Professional Responsibility, a course that entails a substantial research paper, and the CaseArc requirements. Some choose to take a broad range of courses over the many areas of the curriculum. Others may focus on one or two particular areas of interest. Still others may decide to pursue in-depth study through one of our
seven concentrations.