This course guides participants in understanding nonprofit organizations and their management. Topics include motivations for starting nonprofit organizations as well as theories and strategies to balance the unique needs of nonprofits within market economies. This course covers considerations for staffing and volunteer management, funding sources, asset management, program evaluation and leadership structures as elements of identifying qualities of successful nonprofit organizations at various stages of development. Projects may include interviewing, building a nonprofit business plan, and presentations.

In this course, students acquire a basic understanding of the numerous career paths available to lawyers, explore basic concepts of legal professionalism, understand the fundamentals of the business of law, practice the ?soft skills? necessary for effective lawyering, and develop an individual career development strategy for exploring their unique professional interests throughout the next three years. During classes, students meet practitioners from a variety of practice areas. The attorneys address various business and professional issues they handle on a daily basis so that students can begin to discern not only the legal and business issues in different legal practices, but also the professional standards that attorneys will expect of them in the workplace. During a portion of each class, students apply the information they learned from the attorneys to a practical aspect of their own professional development. Students also research and establish a mentoring relationship with a practitioner, attend networking events, participate in community service projects, attend additional events, meetings, and conferences and practice other ?soft skills? as requirements of the course. This class meets for two hours every other week. Students are expected to complete several specific written assignments. Grading is S/U and is based on attendance, participation and satisfactory completion of all projects and written assignments. This is a required 1L course.

This course examines the rules governing transactions in which personal property and fixtures are used as collateral to secure an obligation. This body of law addresses not only the rights of the debtor and creditor inter se but also the rights of third parties with an interest in the collateral. The primary source of authority is Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, but students will also be introduced to other applicable laws, including primarily the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

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.