There is no mandatory curriculum for current JD and LLM students considering the possibility of an academic legal career down the road. Nonetheless, in addition to substantive courses that will provide you an opportunity to write legal scholarship under the guidance of Columbia faculty, the following courses offered in academic year 2007-08 are highly recommended:
Seminar on Legal Education offered by Prof. Peter Strauss. The description is as follows:
The spring of 2007 saw publication of three significant works concerning Legal Education in the United States, "Educating Lawyers," a publication of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching grounded in an extensive empirical study of legal education at a range of law schools (but not Columbia); Elizabeth Mertz, "The Language of Law School: Learning to 'Think Like a Lawyer,'" studying, again with an empirical background, how law school classroom discourse prompts students to shift away from moral and emotional terms in thinking about conflict, toward frameworks of legal authority instead; and "Best Practices for Legal Education," an extended project of the Clinical Legal Education Association. 2007-2008 is the 150th year of continuous legal education at Columbia. It seems a ripe time to revive the dormant Seminar on Legal Education for collective thought about what we are doing and how we are doing it -- here at Columbia, and in law schools generally.
The seminar will read these and other studies of legal education (including Julius Goebel's history of our school) collectively, focusing on the variety of issues legal education has long presented. An effort will be
made to engage colleagues on issues of particular relevance to their work and interests. Seminar papers may explore one or another of these general issues in relation to Columbia's approach to legal education; seminarians will be expected to observe one or more classes in which they are not enrolled in connection with this work. With luck and effort, the collective product will constitute a thoughtful appraisal of today's realities and tomorrow's possible directions.
There are also various Workshops being offered this fall.
The first is the Legal Theory Workshop, run by Professors Emens and Hamburger. The description of the Workshop is as follows:
The Legal Theory Workshop is a long-standing faculty seminar, in which invited speakers, from law and other disciplines, present works in progress for comment and discussion. The topics of the papers -- and therefore of the discussions -- vary widely, depending on the current interests of the invited speakers.
In recent years, students have been invited to participate in the workshop for academic credit. The current structure of the Legal Theory Workshop is as a year-long 3-credit course, with two main classroom components. First, students will read each speaker's paper and attend the biweekly workshop sessions, which are typically held Mondays 4:10 - 6:00. (This year, four of the sessions will be held during Tuesday lunch time.) Second, students will attend biweekly one-hour discussion sessions, led by one of the workshop's faculty directors, at lunchtime (12:10 - 1:00) on Mondays of the workshops (or prior to the Tuesday workshops).
The writing requirements are as follows: one 10-15 page paper each semester, typically responding to one or more of the semester's workshop sessions, and supervised by one of the faculty directors; and three 1-page response papers each semester, posted on the courseweb by noon the day before the relevant lunch meeting for each workshop. Students will also read each other's response papers posted for each session.
Students must take the course for the full year. The first semester will be worth 1 credit, and the second semester will be worth 2 credits, although the requirements are distributed evenly across the year. Speakers in 2007-08 will include Profs. Devon Carbado, Anne Dailey, Eric Posner, Tim Scanlon, Michael Stein, and Winnie Sullivan, among others.
Next, Professors Morrison and Hemphill now run the Law and Economics Workshop. As they explain, in this workshop:
Leading scholars present new theoretical and empirical work in the economic analysis of law. At our first presentation, for example, Harvard economist Michael Kremer will discuss a proposal to protect antiquities through long-term leases, as an attractive alternative to current (and ineffective) prohibitions on their sale. Subsequent workshops will discuss issues in corporate, criminal, property, and other areas of law.
This spring, there will be two additional workshops that you might want to think about now. Prof. Robert Scott organizes the Contract and Economic Organization Workshop and provides the following information:
Again this year, the Contract and Economic Organization Workshop will be held every other Monday from 4 to 6 in the spring semester (alternating with the Legal Theory workshop). The theme of the workshop (as the name implies) is the nature and theory of commercial contracts and their relationship to other forms of economic organization. The workshop is a joint project with faculty from the Law School, the Economics Department,
the Business School and SIPA. The workshop meets to discuss papers in progress by faculty at other institutions. The first 3 or 4 sessions will be papers by law professors and the last three sessions will feature papers by economists. This year, invited faculty will include Barak Richman from Duke, Omri Ben Shahar of Michigan, Paul Mahoney of Virginia and Michael Sykuta, who runs the CORI data base, the largest data base of commercial contracts in the world.
The workshop is open to students on a credit basis (I point credit). Requirements include informal meetings with me in the off week to "teach" the paper and short (2/3 page) reaction papers for each session. Non-enrolled students are also invited to attend as interested (we meet in the Case Lounge).
Also this coming spring, Professors Katherine Franke and Patricia Williams will run the Feminist Theory Workshop. The description is as follows:
The Feminist Legal Theory Workshop will provide students exposure to new work by scholars of feminist legal theory on the topic of: "Technologies of Guilt. Technologies of Innocence. Technologies of Desire." Each week a prominent scholar in this area will come to the Law School to present new work or a work-in-progress and discuss it with the members of the seminar. Students enrolled in the Workshop will be expected to read each paper and write a short response paper in advance of the Workshop meeting. Class attendance is mandatory and students will be evaluated on a pass/fail basis. The Workshop will meet every other week. The list of speakers will be available at the beginning of the spring semester.
