Over the course of the academic year, students will learn to do the following:
- Analyze legal issues, provide an objective legal opinion, and present a persuasive legal argument. To perform these skills, students must be able to understand the sources of law and the structure of the legal system; evaluate the weight of legal sources, extract and synthesize legal rules from legal sources; apply legal rules to a set of facts; distinguish between determinative, explanatory, and coincidental facts; and use a uniform citation system to cite legal sources.
- Communicate, orally and in writing, in a clear, concise, and well-organized manner adapted to the audience. Regardless of whether students aim for a career in litigation or transactional practice, they must be able to express complex ideas clearly and unambiguously—in both written documents and oral presentations—to adjudicators, other lawyers, and non-lawyer parties.
- Perform legal research. When conducting efficient legal research, lawyers draw on both basic research skills and current technology. Basic research skills include locating relevant secondary sources, case law, statutes, regulations, court dockets, transactional forms, and administrative materials. Current technology makes it possible for lawyers to use artificial intelligence and data-driven research sources. Students will learn to identify the place of current technology in legal research and analysis, how to discern current technology’s uses, and how to critically evaluate the output of current technology.
- Act according to the tenets of professional responsibility. Lawyering introduces students to the ethical rules that govern lawyer communications and argument.
- Employ lawyering skills in a culturally competent manner. Lawyering introduces students to issues that arise in the areas of intercultural communication, implicit bias, and professional identity, all of which impact relationships with colleagues, clients, and governmental authorities.
Students achieve the above learning outcomes through lectures, class discussion, small-group work, and longer writing assignments. Writing assignments are set in the context of a simulated law office or judge’s chambers. Students’ work is extensively critiqued by the Lawyering professor and Honors Fellows, and individual professor-student conferences are the norm.
Students research and analyze a wide range of issues in criminal and civil law. For example, in the fall semester, students have researched and written objective analyses of whether AI-generated music infringed the copyright of a well-known musician or was fair use; whether statements on a blog were puffery or violated the false-advertising provisions of the Lanham Act; and whether a backyard treehouse was a “dwelling” when used by a hiker overnight. In the spring, the course transitions from objective to persuasive writing, and students both write and orally argue a case on behalf of a party in litigation. In past years, students have argued for and against a motion to pretermit an asylum claim on the ground that the individual was subject to the terrorism bar; a copyright-infringement case involving video games; a defamation case involving forensic science; and a criminal case about whether a journal entry obtained in a cell search should be excluded for violating the Fourth Amendment and attorney-client privilege.
