This course exposes students to the fundamentals of the major tort doctrines, focusing primarily on negligence and introducing intentional torts, strict liability, and products liability. Through reading primary authorities - cases and statutes - and secondary authorities such as the Restatement of Torts, jury instructions, and related materials, students learn legal principles. Working on skills-based exercises, students practice analyzing and applying torts principles to factual scenarios. During the course students show in writing and orally how lawyers solve problems in the area of torts - what laws they use, how they apply them to new facts, and how they use those facts to make arguments to judges or juries. This course cannot be taken for an S/U grade.

Students will learn how the US regulates the development, marketing, sale, and consumption of legal and illegal drugs. They will explore the history of the FDA and DEA, the regulation of prescription medicines, the history and implications of the war on drugs, and the challenges of implementing harm-reduction strategies. The course will be useful to students interested in a variety of fields including health law, criminal law, mental health law, pharmaceutical regulation, and cannabis law.

Valuation is a prerequisite for thoughtful decision-making. The old management adage?you can?t manage what you don?t measure?remains true today. In business, sound decision-making involves placing reasonable values on assets and strategies to identify the best decisions among competing, but uncertain, choices. While valuation has long been used by businesses to improve decisions, it has been slow to develop as a wide-ranging decision tool in the legal setting. As a result, valuation principles are too often ignored or poorly implemented in legal settings. Valuation should be a fundamental skill possessed by most lawyers. Consider just a few of the legal settings that require valuation to make properly informed decisions: ? Developing remedies in the litigation context. ? Making sue-or-settle decisions. ? Crafting effective laws and regulations. ? Determining how much to spend on legal services. ? Developing and executing business strategies that are based on legal rights (such as intellectual property strategies). ? Evaluating the success or failure of negotiations. In each of these contexts, the decision-maker must make a value judgment (the option chosen is better than options not chosen), whether the decision-maker appreciates it or not. For example, when a client decides to settle a lawsuit, she has valued the settlement alternative higher than the litigation alternative. Therefore, the choice is not whether to employ a valuation analysis. Rather, the choice is whether to employ an intelligent valuation analysis that helps inform the decision or to employ a jumbled process that ignores such valuable information. One reason (and probably the most powerful reason) for the slow development of valuation analysis in the legal setting is the common misperception that valuation is too difficult. This course will seek to disprove that notion. This course will teach students how to apply valuation principles in their future legal practice and become more effective lawyers. Strong math skills are not required. We will not employ any mathematical concepts beyond what is required in a 6th grade math class.

This course focuses on litigation under 42 U.S.C. 1983 - the principal vehicle for civil rights claims prosecuted in the federal courts. The primary emphasis of the course is on the practical and procedural aspects of civil rights litigation, including matters such as standing, immunities, various issues relating to pleading and proof, the availability and choice of remedies, and the recovery of attorneys' fees. The course is designed to give students the practical skills required to effectively litigate civil rights claims in the federal courts while providing insight into the larger jurisprudential debate that has shaped the law in this area.