Course Section | Columbia Law School

Section Description Provided by Instructor

The Legal Theory Workshop is a longstanding 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, a number of the sessions might 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 five 1-page response papers each semester, due by noon the day before the relevant lunch meeting for each workshop.

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.