Course Selection for 1L Students
By Janet Stearns, Dean of Students
In the Spring 2008 Semester, our 1L students will enroll in four required subjects and 1 elective. This memorandum is to provide you with an overview of these spring subjects.
Required Subjects:
1) Criminal Procedure
An introduction to the criminal process with special emphasis on constitutional issues. It covers equal protection of the law, arrest, interrogation, search and seizure, and the right to counsel.
2) US Constitutional Law 1
The study of the American constitutional system, concentrating on the idea of judicial review, relationships among the three branches of government, and allocations of responsibility between federal and state governments.
3) Legal Research & Writing II
The second part of the Legal Research & Writing Program. The spring semester focuses upon brief-writing and oral arguments.
4) Contracts (If you did not have this in the fall semester)
Examines the purpose and scope of the legal protection accorded agreements. The course focuses on problems of contract formation and interpretation, remedies for breach of contract, the offer and acceptance of a contract, the effect of changed circumstances, and more complicated questions, such as contracts that are impossible to perform.
Property (If you did not have this in the fall semester)
Focus is on basic principles governing private and public control over tangible and intangible resources, especially land. The course addresses concepts and policies concerning property and special concepts concerning real estate, such as estates in land, future interests, and the rule against perpetuities. The course also studies real estate transactions, recording, methods of title assurance, easements, covenants, and land use controls.
1L Electives
As 1L students, you can choose one elective course. The choices are below. Some of you may find that a particular subject area is of the greatest interest to you and select your courses in that way. Others may prefer to choose on the basis of the faculty members. I have listed their names, and you may read more about them by visiting this web site: http://www.law.miami.edu/facadmin/. If you have additional questions or advice, you can email us at deanofstudents@law.miami.edu
Please remember that you must go online through MYUM on Friday, November 9 to select your 1L elective course. Your other courses and faculty are pre-assigned to you by section.
Administrative Law - Professor Cynthia Drew
This is a course about the rules that shape and constrain federal power to affect people's lives through the mechanism of federal administrative agencies (also known as "bureaucrats"), and of the struggle to reconcile effective government with the demands of fairness and accountability. The course surveys the powers of the federal government to make rules and regulations, and to conduct executive branch investigations and adjudications.
Attention is paid to the legislature's role in drafting (often ambiguous) statutes giving powers and duties to federal agencies, and to the legislature's subsequent role in supervising agencies. The course also examines the use of lawsuits to invoke judicial authority to constrain agencies pursuant to constitutional, statutory, and common-law principles.
Administrative Law provides a particularly valuable background for students who are considering a practice involving a highly regulated area such as: Banking, Communications, Disability, Environmental, Family and Child services, Labor, Housing, and Land Use. It is also essential for anyone thinking of working in a government agency.
Analysis of Evidence - Professors Anderson & Twining
This will be a shorter (2 credit) version of Professor Anderson's first year option on Analysis of Evidence, based on largely the same materials (including Anderson and Twining, Analysis of Evidence). It is open only to students who have not already taken this course. The object is to master some specific techniques of constructing and criticizing arguments about questions of fact, both in and out of court, by working through simple and less simple examples set in various contexts and at least one complex trial record. Towards the end of the course we shall explore the uses and limitations of this kind of logical analysis (including Wigmore charts), its application to fields like military intelligence, and how rational argument relates to narrative, rhetoric and story-telling in this context. The general verdict on this course over the years has been: tough, but fun.
Environmental Law - Professor Richard Williamson
This course covers the basic environmental issues from a policy and legal perspective. General viewpoints on environmental protection and the major governmental and other players are surveyed. The federal pollution control statutes are covered, including air pollution, water pollution, drinking water quality, hazardous waste disposal, clean up of contaminated sites, and regulation of pesticides and other toxic substances. Environmental litigation problems, constitutional issues, and NEPA and its environmental impact analysis requirements will also be discussed.
Housing Discrimination - Professor Marc Fajer
This course will explore the scope of discrimination in housing in the United States and the nature and adequacy of the legal remedies created to prevent it. We will focus primarily on federal statutory law, but will also examine some state statutes and some historical and constitutional materials. An important theme of the class will be differences between the kinds of categories protected by state and federal statutes (e.g., race, sex, disabilities, marital status) and whether the legal regime sufficiently considers those differences. The course also will provide some practice with generally applicable statutory interpretation and drafting skills.
Short written exercises, class participation and final exam. Topics covered are likely to include the meaning of race under the 1866 Civil Rights Act, proving discrimination, discriminatory advertising, sexual harassment, accommodation of persons with disabilities, discrimination to achieve integration, marital status discrimination, and claims that enforcement of certain fair housing provisions violates the free exercise rights of landlords.
Labor & Employment Law - Professor Kenneth Casebeer
This course introduces the regulatory structuring of relations of work. Through common law in labor and statutes, we will identify the contemporary role of law in labor market organization. Topics will include legal definition of the status of employment, collective organization and bargaining, contract termination and unemployment insurance, workplace governance--safety, sterilization, drug testing, speech--and plant closing and worker ownership. Seeing the interrelationships between different areas of work law help reveal the way the political organization of the state both reflects and constructs society.
Social Justice - Professor Mahoney
This course provides an overview of several areas of law and social justice with an emphasis on the role and responsibilities of lawyers. We open with questions of funding and delivering legal services to populations in need of assistance, including middle-income and low-income people. We review the ways in which legal doctrines shape claims that can be brought in social justice lawyering, and we will study issues that arise when lawyers work with community organizations. Through looking at recent social justice movements, we will also study the ways that activism interacts with legal change through both litigation and legislative action. The class will hear from several guest speakers who have built self-sustaining legal practices doing innovative work for social justice. Exam (1/2 credit); short papers, group project
Family Law - Professor Mary Coombs
1) What's Family Law about?
Family law involves the application of a whole range of other legal subjects – torts, contracts, and property – to relations among family members. It also involves examining the role that the law and legal institutions do (and should play) in defining what counts as a family and channeling the behavior of family members as family members. This course focuses on the "private" law of family, in which the disputes are between adults who are (or once were) in intimate partnerships, generally regarding money or children or both. It does not include "public" family law, in which the state seeks to intervene directly into family relations, primarily through issues of dependency (covered in "children and the law") or family law after or in contemplation of death, i.e. trusts and estates.
2) What Will the Class Require?
For the 1L elective, there will be a number of short in-class quizzes during the semester as well as a (shorter than otherwise required) final exam. There will also be exercises during the semester to work through some of the issues. These will be gone over in class; depending on enrollment they may be graded or subject only to a cursory review for a PF grade.
3) Why Would Someone Want to Take It?
First, whatever kind of law you end up practicing, you are likely to do some family law – because your family members and their friends will expect you to (unless you already have a family member who has taken on this intra-familial obligation!!); also, it is a bar topic. Second, it involves working through some of the deepest and most complicated issues the law faces, in which sociology, psychology, history, political science and economics all help inform what law has done and can do, both positively and negatively. (Although – warning – it also involves some really basic numbers/arithmetic as we work through exercises in dividing marital property and determining amounts for spousal or child support.)
4) What Kind of Students Would I Like to See?
Because the course touches on so many areas of law and so many other disciplines the course benefits from students who will engage in discussion. Each of you also will come to the course having lived in families and seen how other families work; while every family is different, there are also patterns that are inflected by race, class, ethnicity and other demographics: the more perspectives we can collectively bring to bear the better we can grapple with the complex issues of family law.
For more about me, you can see my website - http://faculty.law.miami.edu/mcoombs -- or talk to the Section A students who are taking torts from me this fall!!
