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Your first year, which carries 30 credits, brings you into contact with required courses that are fundamental to understanding the law. Upon entering, you join some 80 fellow students in a section that remains together and follows the same curriculum over the next two semesters, encouraging friendships and support.
Substantive Courses
Civil Procedure (six credits) -- the study of civil litigation from the inception of a law suit through trial and appeal.
Contracts (five credits) -- the law of binding promises, incorporating such elements as consideration, performance and breach, remedies, and impossibility.
Property
(four credits) -- introduces and examines concepts of ownership, possession, and transfer of property.
Torts (four credits) -- liability for negligence and for intentional interference with person or property and liability without fault.
Criminal Law (four credits) -- including criminal procedure, evidence, criminal punishment, federal criminal law, and trial advocacy.
Statutory Courses (three credits) -- students can select from one of four offerings -- Consumer Protection, Employment Discrimination, Environmental Law, and Federal Income Taxation.
Skills Courses
The ability to find the facts -- legal research -- and interpret and present the facts -- legal analysis and writing -- is critical in your successful pursuit of a law degree and your success in the practice of law.
To take or defend a position in the law, you need the facts to back you up and to distinguish your point of view. That takes research.
To organize the material and express it convincingly, you have to analyze the facts and interpret the findings in support of your position. That takes the ability to write.
Legal Writing and Research (two credits) -- You begin learning those skills your first semester in Legal Writing and Research. In LW&R you do research in state and federal law, learning to use the resources offered by the Law LibraryÍs extensive collection. Working with a given fact situation, you produce three balanced office memoranda and a case brief.
Moot Court (or Legal Analysis) (two credits) -- In the spring, students enrolled in Moot Court learn and use computer-based research tools to research the law and prepare an appellate brief. After practicing oral arguments on videotape, students present their arguments before a panel of lawyers and judges.
Legal Analysis (or Moot Court) -- Some first-year students take Legal Analysis the second semester to develop problem-solving skills for legal reasoning. In weekly writing assignments and in-class written exercises, students practice fact discrimination and analysis, issue spotting, rule analysis, rule application and argumentation, and organization. These students take Moot Court in the second year.
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