Course | Columbia Law School

Legislation is a course about today's most important source of law, statutes rather than the work of courts. We will study Congress and its functioning. We will seek to understand how statutes are created. This may include exercises in drafting, as well as attention to legislative functioning and the ways in which lawyers (for example, as lobbyists) may participate in it. In working with legislative outputs, we will tend to stress the ways in which lawyers most frequently encounter statutory problems, before, rather than after, judges have had an opportunity to consider them. This will lead us to study how courts, as well, will engage in interpretation. These changing and contentious approaches set the framework within which lawyers must advise clients how to spend the considerable resources that may have to be committed, or make the other risky commitments, years before a court will find any need to speak to the issue. But our emphases, building on the statutory elements of Legal Methods, will be on acquiring the skills of sound advising, not litigating, and on legislatures, not courts.