Students are expected to take all required Foundation courses in their 1st year and in the beginning of their 2nd year (property or constitutional law). In the 2nd year, students must take 31 credits of US law. (Since students will later have 2 full years of French civil and European law, their focus must be on American law topics). Generally, students are not encouraged to take clinical law or foreign and comparative law offerings.
At University of Paris I-Sorbonne
The French academic calendar runs roughly from the first week of October to the end of January, and then February through the end of June.
In the first year of the Program in Paris students must take the following courses: Business Law I and II (with travaux dirigés), Contracts I and II (with travaux dirigés), Administrative Law I and II (with travaux dirigés), Introduction to Civil Law, Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, European Community Law, and Family Law. In the second year at Paris I, students must take Advanced Civil Law I and II and International Private Law I and II (both with travaux dirigés) and must choose between Labor Law I and II or Corporae Tax Law (each with accompanying travaux dirigés). In addition to these three subjects, six additional elective courses must be taken. Samples of elective courses are: Banking & Securities, Labor Law, International Public Law, Law of Int'l. Commerce, Euro. Commercial Law, Commercial Law/Bankruptcy, Sureties/Guarantees, Matrimonial Law, Intellectual Property, Criminal Procedure Law and Civil Procedure, among others. In the first year in Paris, courses are those taught to French students in the 1st and 2nd years of law school. In the second year in Paris, they are courses taught to French students in their 3rd and 4th years. The curriculum at Paris focuses on private law courses, and has been organized to provide students with a solid grounding in French law and the majority of subjects covered in the Paris Bar. Courses are almost exclusively lecture-style, while the travaux dirigés are small seminar-type offerings.
