Course Catalog

This seminar examines the legal history of the interrelationship of race and citizenship in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course pays special attention to the active role that law has played historically in racially defining U.S. and state citizenship and the consequent rights and duties that flowed from it.
The changing law of American citizenship was an important determiner of inclusion and exclusion in the US and a site for the legal construction of persistent socio economic inequalities. The seminar will attempt to incorporate both primary sources as well as secondary studies by leading legal-historical scholars as we survey the major citizenship cases and controversies, from the original U.S. Naturalization Act to Dred Scott; from the role of judicial statutory interpretation in defining race to epic 20th century battles over immigration and its restriction.

• Type: Seminar

This course examines the legal history of the interrelationship of race and the law in the United States across the 19th and 20th centuries. The course pays special attention to the active role that law has played historically in racially defining U.S. and state citizenship and the consequent rights and duties that flowed from the use of race as a measure of national as well as local belonging. The changing nature of the relationship of race to American law over time was an important determiner of inclusion and exclusion in the US and a site for the legal construction of socio-economic inequality as well as moments of more equitable aspiration. The course will attempt to incorporate both lecture material as well as the close discussion of secondary studies by leading legal-historical scholars as we survey major cases and controversies, from the legal and constitutional roots of slavery to the infamous Dred Scott decision; from American Indian dispossession to an overseas empire; from the role of judicial statutory interpretation in defining race to epic turn-of-the-century battles over immigration restriction to the civil rights revolution of the late 20th century and its consequences and limitations. A key feature of this class will be the use of locally as well as nationally-renowned speakers to aid in our collective exploration of the relationship of law and race over the course of American history.

• Type: Upper Class

Equal protection doctrine has long ceased to be useful — or even recognizable — as a path to racial equality. Through its narrow definition of discriminatory intent and its use of colorblindness to invalidate affirmative action, equal protection has become a tool for entrenching racial caste, rather than dismantling it. In this seminar, we will explore how we might reimagine equal protection through discussion of dissenting opinions, critical legal scholarship, and other commentary. We will also discuss the role of civil rights statutes as a means for restoring its promise.

• Type: Seminar

This course covers the regulation of securities offerings and trading under the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. It examines offerings and the registration process under the Securities Act, along with reporting requirements under the Exchange Act. The course will also cover fraud, insider trading and civil liabilities under both Acts.

• Type: Upper Class

In the Senior Judge Seminar students work closely with Legal Practice professors in connection with various aspects of the first-year Legal Practice course. Each Legal Practice professor interviews, chooses and supervises the Senior Judge Seminar students for the Legal Practice section taught by that professor.

• Type: Upper Class

The Senior Judge Seminar II is a graded course intended to allow selected students who have excelled in the Senior Judge I seminar to work in greater depth with a Legal Practice professor in connection with the Legal Practice course. Each Legal Practice professor interviews, chooses and supervises the Senior Judge Seminar II students for the Legal Practice section taught by the professor.

• Type: Upper Class

This seminar explores the jurisprudential, philosophical, and practical lessons that students of the law can draw from the life and works of William Shakespeare. We will consider some key characteristics of the law in Shakespeare’s time, how Shakespeare’s personal experiences shaped his understanding of the law, how our interpretation of Shakespeare’s work raises questions of originalism similar to those we encounter in the law, how his plays portray the law, lawyers, those who enforce the law, and those who sit in judgment, what his plays have to teach us about the art of persuasion and argument, what his plays tell us about individual responsibility within a social structure, how the plays explore the effect of mental illness on that responsibility, and how the plays help us think and talk about difficult issues like misogyny, racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. Reading assignments in this course will be heavy and energetic engagement in classroom discussions will be expected. Students will be required to prepare four five-page papers in the course of the term. Final grades will be based on the quality of classroom discussion and the quality of the papers.

• Type: Seminar

The South Africa Externship offers students the chance to spend the Winter semester working for a non-profit, government agency, or court. Since 1996, Michigan Law has placed over 150 students in full-semester externships, including positions at the Human Rights Commission (Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban), Legal Resources Centre (Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, Grahamstown), University of Cape Town, Refugee Law Clinic, the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Johannesburg), Centre for Environmental Rights (Cape Town), Scalabrini (Cape Town) and Lawyers for Human Rights (Johannesburg) to name a few.

Before they arrive, in odd years, students take a course in Constitutionalism in South Africa, taught by Karthy Govender of Durban in person in Ann Arbor, MI, giving them a good grasp of the seminal South African cases so students can “hit the ground running” upon their arrival, as well as a companion seminar meant to enrich their experience (Law 939). In odd years, the students only take the companion seminar and spend longer at their placements in South Africa. Students apply in the Winter before the program begins the following January.

For more information, visit our website or contact [email protected]. We are happy to meet with students to answer questions, give guidance on potential placements, provide information on how to apply, etc. Further, every January we hold an informational meeting for all of our international externship programs, so please watch for that announcement.

• Type: Externship

South Africa Externship Seminar
This contemporaneous, one-credit seminar is held every Winter as a required companion to the South Africa Externship (Law 938). For more information, please visit the course description for Law 938.

• Type: Externship

This course introduces students to the various legal and business considerations involved in the representation of startup companies and in structuring venture capital transactions. The first portion of the course focuses on the key issues involved in forming and operating an emerging growth business (a “startup”), including selecting and forming a business entity, structuring the economic benefits and management control among various owners, protecting intellectual property assets and complying with securities laws. With that foundation, the second portion of the course focuses on the significant legal and business issues involved in a venture capital financing transaction from both the company and the investor perspective (with a look at “crowdfunding”). The course combines theory and practice in order to prepare students for the types of projects and challenges they will confront as transactional lawyers.
A knowledge of corporate and business associations law, as well as securities law and finance, will be helpful to a student in this course. That being said, there are no formal prerequisites, and the course is structured for beginners as well as for students with more subject matter expertise.

• Type: Upper Class

This course explores problems, successes, and reforms associated with litigation by public stockholders against corporate fiduciaries and other participants in corporate transactions. Corporate law doctrine is enforced almost exclusively by minority stockholders. At its best, stockholder litigation may redress and deter corporate misconduct. Yet, the mechanisms of stockholder litigation are open to systemic abuse. We will examine forms of stockholder litigation, and means by which courts and commentators have sought to restrict or shape it. We will also examine unique issues affecting public unitholder litigation for limited partnerships and limited liability companies. We will look almost exclusively to the law of the State of Delaware, given its national prominence in corporate law. Prerequisite: Enterprise Organization or Corporate Lawyer: Law & Ethics.

• Type: Upper Class

This seminar is designed for students with an interest in academic writing. Before the term begins each student must have previously written a draft of an academic paper that they would like to revise substantially in the course of the workshop, either for publication or for presentation on the academic job market. The first four or five sessions of the term will be devoted to reading articles written by young scholars who subsequently got academic jobs and discussing their strengths and weaknesses. The balance of the term will be devoted to presenting and critiquing the works in progress of the workshop students as the papers undergo revision. Students will be responsible not only for presenting and revising their own papers, but for commenting upon each other’s work. Each student paper will be presented twice over the course of the semester: first, by a student commentator, and second, following revision, by the student author. The workshop will meet once a week for a 2-hour session. Students interested in enrolling in the workshop should submit draft papers to Professor Eisenberg by email directed to [email protected].

• Type: Seminar

Substantive due process doctrine examines whether the government’s deprivation of a person’s life, liberty, or property is justified by a good enough reason. In this seminar, we’ll look at the doctrine’s background and incarnations over time, including the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. We’ll focus particularly on the “anti-canonical” cases (Lochner and Scott v. Sanford); sexual, reproductive, and marital autonomy; and the rights of individuals confined by the state.

• Type: Seminar

The professor of this practice simulation will submit cutting-edge problems which he has faced in practice. The students will resolve those problems by structuring transactions to accomplish the client’s business goals within the framework of non-tax legal requirements, without incurring unnecessary tax liabilities and in a manner that otherwise optimizes the client’s tax posture. Typically, the students will be assigned to work in teams. With each problem, the students submit their solutions in writing, and one team will present its solution to the class orally. The professor will discuss and evaluate the teams’ solutions in light of the one that was employed in practice. Prior to the students preparing and submitting their solutions, there will be lectures and discussion of the tax issues involved in each problem.
The goal of the practice simulation course is to immerse the students in the process of approaching problems from a transactional perspective. The students will be given a set of facts and objectives, and will be required to determine what steps should be taken to achieve those objectives. An additional goal is to provide the students with exposure to the manner in which experienced lawyers utilize their skills to solve complex problems. The principal issues on which the problems will focus are corporate tax issues, but other areas will likely be covered. For example, partnership tax issues and issues involving the taxation of financial instruments have played a significant role in certain case studies. In recent semesters, problems have involved, among other matters, complex tax-free corporate mergers, corporate divisions (spin-offs), acquisitions of controlling interests in non-U.S. corporations, and transactions designed to illustrate the difference between legitimate tax planning and abusive corporate tax shelters.

• Type: Practice Simulation

The United States tax system, in addition to being the primary source of government revenue, has evolved over the past five decades into the vehicle for several of the country’s largest social safety nets. But even as the IRS distributes billions of dollars in refundable tax credits to working people and families with children each year, low-income taxpayers can find themselves trapped without legal support in a web of federal tax enforcement and state and local tax burdens.

In this seminar, we will survey the many ways that the tax code permeates the lives of the working poor and those living in poverty. We will study tax as redistribution by exploring the history and impact of programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the 2020 and 2021 Economic Impact Payments. In contrast, we also will study tax as control by examining how the tax code both shapes individual behavior and demarcates deservedness with respect to government aid.

Along the way, we will consider the intersections of tax policy and identity along axes such as race, gender, disability, and citizenship. Finally, we will look to the future and abroad to ask whether and how the U.S. should reconsider its approach to taxation and poverty. Students will leave the course with a deepened understanding of the successes, shortcomings, and nuances of one of the country’s primary anti-poverty policy levers.

Note: You do not need to have taken Taxation of Individual Income or any other tax course to enroll in this seminar.

• Type: Seminar

This is the basic course in federal income taxation. It is a statutory course, and the principal source of law will be the Internal Revenue Code. The topics covered will include the definition of gross income and the determination of permissible deductions from gross income. The class will also analyze numerous Code provisions and doctrines that raise issues of tax timing (that is, in what year should a given item of income or a given deduction be taken into account) and income attribution (that is, to whom should a given item of income or a given deduction be attributed). The bulk of the course will be devoted to learning basic statutory analysis. In addition, however, the class will spend some time studying the policy rationales underlying the structure of the current federal income tax laws and will consider the pros and cons of alternative systems. This course is a prerequisite to a number of other courses, including Corporate Taxation, Partnership Tax, Business and Estate Planning, and International Tax.

• Type: Upper Class

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In 1980, approximately 500,000 people were behind bars in this country. Now, even after significant pandemic-related decarceration, the figure approaches 2 million (nearly two-thirds of whom are non-white), locked up in jails, state prisons, and federal prisons. This course will examine both constitutional law and statutory law relevant to their incarceration. The central topics are the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments and its Fourteenth Amendment analog, and Congress’s regulation of prison-related litigation in the Prison Litigation Reform Act. We’ll also examine First Amendment and related statutory rights behind bars, the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act within prisons and jails, solitary and supermax confinement, race discrimination inside jails and prison, and the law of injunctive relief in constitutional cases brought by incarcerated people. (We will not discuss criminal procedure, habeas corpus, or sentencing.) This course is for anyone interested in civil rights, criminal prosecution, or criminal defense.
A one-credit Colloquium will be open to anyone in the main class; it will include a jail visit plus five class meetings of 2 hours each. Colloquium students will be linked up to lawyers and advocacy organizations working on prison or jail litigation, and will assist them by performing legal research and writing.

• Type: Upper Class

For this one-credit add-on to The Law of Incarceration, students will be linked up to lawyers and advocacy organizations working on prison or jail litigation, and will assist them by performing necessary legal research and writing. Students who took The Law of Incarceration without the colloquium in a prior term are welcome to join the current colloquium.

• Type: Upper Class

This seminar will introduce students to the nature and function of the military justice system and contemporary issues in military law. Selected topics will include an introduction to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the law of armed conflict, rules of engagement, court-martial jurisdiction, unique military offenses and defenses, First Amendment rights of military personnel, conscientious objection, the special role of commanders in the military legal system, efforts to reform the military justice system, Guantanamo and military commissions, military vaccination requirements, and military ethics. Throughout the course we will analyze and evaluate tensions among individual rights, military standards, and national security requirements; think critically about the similarities and differences between civilian and military justice; and, reflect on the vitality of military law in the 21st century. Class will be centered on robust discussion informed by readings, response papers, and occasional media presentations. This class is open to all students interested in engaging the subject matter — a military or national security background is not required.

• Type: Seminar

Compensation at law for private wrongs and intentional wrongs as well as accidents, with principal emphasis on harms to person and property. Special areas such as product liability, defamation, or business torts will be treated selectively.

• Type: First Year Required

In this practice/simulation course, students will begin to develop the legal skills needed to represent clients in business transactions. Among other things, the seminar covers translating the client’s business objectives into legal concepts, and then incorporating those concepts into the actual language of an agreement in clear, consistent, and concise manner. Students will learn how to analyze a contract from the client’s perspective, with an eye to advancing the client’s interests and protecting the client as much as possible from risk. The practice/simulation course also identifies how attorneys can use drafting techniques to solve problems that arise while a deal is being done. Students will engage in simulations and exercises in class, and undertake drafting assignments outside of class.

• Type: Practice Simulation

Hundreds of American Indian tribes operate their own justice systems. Their courts decide thousands of cases a year. Many span the full panoply of law—from criminal, civil, and probate cases, to divorce and environmental disputes. Tribal Law is a survey of the laws that tribes enact to govern themselves. It considers issues ranging from governance (elections, justice systems, and tribal constitutions), to conflicts between individuals (contracts, property, domestic relations, torts), to regulation of a tribal community’s economy.

• Type: Upper Class

The Veterans Legal Clinic offers students the opportunity to learn holistic, client-centered lawyering through representing military veterans in a broad array of civil legal matters. While some of the cases the VLC handles are specific to this client population, such as veterans benefits cases and discharge upgrades, the majority of the clinic’s cases involve broader civil legal issues, including family law, housing, consumer disputes, financial exploitation, disability, employment, public benefits, etc. The clinic seeks to foster in its students a strong professional identity, advocacy skills, and consistent engagement in reflective, intentional practice while providing excellent legal services to a severely underserved population. Students will take the lead in all aspects of their cases, including client interviews, pleading drafting, fact investigation, discovery, negotiation, court hearings, and trials. Students will also have the opportunity to interact professionally with a wide variety of social service, medical, mental health, and other providers in the effort to meet their clients’ needs. The Veterans Legal Clinic meets the New York Pro Bono requirement.
Students must enroll for the 4-credit clinic and the 3-credit seminar, taken concurrently. The Veterans Legal Clinic is a 7-credit course; all credits are graded.
The Clinic seminar fulfills the Law School’s professional responsibility requirement for graduation, but does not fulfill the New York State Bar ethics requirement.

• Type: Clinic

The Veterans Legal Clinic offers students the opportunity to learn holistic, client-centered lawyering through representing military veterans in a broad array of civil legal matters. While some of the cases the VLC handles are specific to this client population, such as veterans benefits cases and discharge upgrades, the majority of the clinic’s cases involve broader civil legal issues, including family law, housing, consumer disputes, financial exploitation, disability, employment, public benefits, etc. The clinic seeks to foster in its students a strong professional identity, advocacy skills, and consistent engagement in reflective, intentional practice while providing excellent legal services to a severely underserved population. Students will take the lead in all aspects of their cases, including client interviews, pleading drafting, fact investigation, discovery, negotiation, court hearings, and trials. Students will also have the opportunity to interact professionally with a wide variety of social service, medical, mental health, and other providers in the effort to meet their clients’ needs. The Veterans Legal Clinic meets the New York Pro Bono requirement.
Students must enroll for the 4-credit clinic and the 3-credit seminar, taken concurrently. The Veterans Legal Clinic is a 7-credit course; all credits are graded.
The Clinic seminar fulfills the Law School’s professional responsibility requirement for graduation, but does not fulfill the New York State Bar ethics requirement.

• Type: Clinic

This course provides an overview of the international legal norms and implementation mechanisms for the protection of women’s human rights, including the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. It explores the historical roots of these norms and examines the theoretical construct of women’s human rights from diverse feminist perspectives. Given that discrimination against women remains one of the most pervasive violations of human rights globally, the course tackles the challenges to implementing these norms in women’s lived experience. It addresses concrete dilemmas facing women human rights defenders seeking to use international law and human rights mechanisms to end violations and achieve equality. Specific topics covered include violence against women, sexual harassment, global and anti-racist feminisms, and the economic, social and cultural rights of women, as well as the impacts on women’s rights of the climate emergency, of the COVID 19 pandemic and of diverse forms of fundamentalism and extremism.

• Type: Upper Class

The Zell Entrepreneurship Clinic (ZEC) supports the University’s burgeoning entrepreneurial ecosystem by representing student-led entrepreneurial ventures as well as local startups and small businesses. Student attorneys in the ZEC encounter real-world transactional lawyering experiences with a focus on developing a business-oriented, client-centered mindset.
The ZEC offers transactional and counseling legal services to startups and established small companies in the following areas:
* Selecting and forming a legal entity and structuring ownership and capital
* Counseling on and prosecuting intellectual property matters (e.g., copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secret)
* Drafting and negotiating contracts
* Advising on employment matters
* Assisting on corporate fundraising and finance issues
Students in the ZEC typically represent multiple clients and assume primary responsibility for all client matters under the close supervision of ZEC faculty. Student attorneys plan client matters; interview and counsel clients; draft various legal agreements, documents, correspondence and memos; prosecute patent and trademark applications; and identify and research legal issues to help their clients implement their decisions. Student attorneys also take turns offering community office hours where they provide legal information to local entrepreneurs. Furthermore, student attorneys are exposed to the regional entrepreneurial ecosystem through attendance of local events as a class. During the weekly seminar sessions, students discuss lawyering skills and values, ethical issues, client issues and some substantive law. Student attorneys review and reflect on their work and receive detailed feedback from ZEC faculty during weekly supervision meetings.
There are no prerequisites for taking the ZEC. Because much of the client work will be in corporate, tax, intellectual property, employment, and other business areas, students will likely find prior course work in those areas helpful.

• Type: Clinic

At a time when infrastructure spending is increasing across the country (thanks to transformational legislation enacted in 2021), this course is intended to make students knowledgeable about, and comfortable with, the world of public works. It will also explore and how attorneys help make major infrastructure projects happen — or how they throw up roadblocks that may stymie efforts to put “shovels in the ground.” The course will include a mix of lecture, seminar-style discussion, and speakers from the private and public sectors who are subject matter experts and have first-hand experience working on infrastructure projects. For each class, students will be given reading assignments from source materials. The syllabus will be divided into three sections. The principal objective of the first four class sessions will be to provide a foundational understanding of infrastructure — its definition, its history, its role in society, the ethical dilemmas it often presents and how political challenges necessitate new and unconventional financing models, including public-private partnerships. The next four classes will focus on the tight nexus that exists between law and infrastructure. During these sessions, students will discuss and become familiarized with the “Legal ABCs” of infrastructure law, particularly in the areas of condemnation, regulatory compliance, environmental law and commercial law. During the final five classes, students will enter the “real world” by understanding how major infrastructure projects actually have (or have not) gotten done. Particular emphasis will be placed on the Gordie Howe International Bridge, Enbridge Line 5, road funding, the High Line, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, successful and unsuccessful public-private partnerships and the Sidewalk Labs innovation district project in Toronto. The section of the class will also focus on infrastructure oversight and how law firms might begin to assess their capacity to provide infrastructure-related services. Grades will be based on a final 15-page research/writing assignment, two short essays, one group presentation and class participation.

• Type: Upper Class

This course introduces the basic concepts and methods used in the preparation of the four corporate financial statements (the balance sheet, income statement, statement of cash flows, and statement of stockholders’ equity). In this process, the course will also develop the accounting treatment of specific items such as long-term assets, inventory, sales, receivables, and debt securities. The course will use actual corporate financial statements of Fortune 500 companies and will provide students the tools necessary to understand such statements as well as some of the basic footnote disclosures associated with such statements.
Students who have substantial background in financial accounting or who have taken classes in financial accounting are ineligible to take or receive credit for this course for a grade. However, students who took only an introductory class in financial accounting a significant amount of time ago may request permission from the instructor to take the course for a grade.

• Type: Upper Class

This course includes a thorough examination of the legal framework—constitutional, statutory, and common law—that empowers and constrains a wide range of federal administrative agencies. We will also look at the ways agencies themselves make law through rulemaking and adjudicate cases, and cover a range of other topics, including agency due process, adjudication in agencies, limitations on judicial review, standing, and finality. We will also engage issues of current concern, including presidential control of agencies and so-called e-government. This course is for students who have not taken Law 569, Legislation and Regulation.

• Type: Upper Class

Administrative law as a field has focused, somewhat myopically, on the role of federal courts in reviewing and constraining agency action. This judicial focal point should come as no surprise. Federal courts, after all, serve as a critical bulwark in the modern regulatory state. This seminar, however, explores how it is a mistake to fixate just on courts. So much of administrative law happens without courts. Put differently, federal agencies regulate us in many meaningful, and sometimes frightening, ways that either evade judicial review entirely or are at least substantially insulated from such review. This seminar surveys recent scholarly work on administrative law and regulatory practice to better understand this concept of bureaucracy beyond judicial review. Each week we will focus on a different aspect of the modern regulatory state.

• Type: Seminar

Students are enrolled by invitation only, after having expressed interest to one of the experiential education faculty or administrators. Students will receive between 2 to 5 credits, to be determined by the faculty member and students.

• Type: Externship

This graded course gives a select group of students who have excelled in a Problem Solving Initiative (PSI) class the chance to spend another semester, under faculty supervision, working on the subject matter of that PSI class. The course is designed to give students a more in-depth problem solving experience at a higher level of sophistication than may have been possible during their original PSI classes. Students may only enroll following PSI faculty invitation. Faculty and invited students determine the number of credits to be awarded.

• Type: Problem Solving Initiative

Public advocates — advocates on matters of concern to the public at large — often face big, important issues with few resources against almost overwhelming odds. We find ourselves battling large businesses, governments, or entire industries to stop a polluting mine, to restart a community’s access to clean drinking water, or to restore voting rights. Yet in many cases, we somehow find a way to win. How is that possible? That is the question we will explore in this class. We will look at a series of case studies of successful and unsuccessful public advocacy campaigns that employed a wide variety of advocacy tools: media, organizing, lobbying, and litigation. The case studies will be drawn from civil rights, worker rights, democracy protection, and environmental campaigns. Students also will develop their own case studies and share them with the class. In the process, we will cover quite a bit of public interest law; every case will be grounded in statutes and common law, and many of them include significant litigation. As a class, we will explore why certain advocacy campaigns worked, why others didn’t, who benefited from the victories and who suffered from the losses. As the semester progresses, we will develop rules and guidelines for good advocacy and a list of questions for good advocates to consider, culminating in a model for public advocacy.

• Type: Seminar

This course is designed to teach all students, however they plan to use their law school education, the skills necessary to creatively solve problems in whatever professional context they might arise. We use the classic James Harr’s A Civil Action (Vintage 1996) to teach the interpersonal, communication and analytical skills lawyers need to become successful problem solvers. This story demonstrates how Jan Schlichtmann could have achieved a more successful outcome for his clients if only he had applied these basic skills in that case. With this foundation, we develop an understanding of problem- solving methodology and the use of negotiation and mediation, two of the primary ADR processes for solving problems. Experiential learning is the fundamental teaching method. Students will learn to apply negotiation and mediation theory in simulated exercises with students playing the roles of negotiator, mediator, advocate and client in these simulations. Students receive feedback on their performance based on in-class faculty observation as well a post-exercise class discussion. Arbitration is the third process within the ADR constellation. We begin with a discussion of ad how to determine whether arbitration is an appropriate process for solving a client’s problem. Then, we focus on the legal infrastructure of arbitration, the Federal Arbitration Act and recent cases that have shaped the current arbitration legal landscape. We also discuss legislative efforts to address issues of fairness in arbitration, particularly focusing on mandatory class action waivers and their impact on consumers and employees. The course concludes with a discussion of other creative ways to resolve disputes, including the use of the apology and its use at the University of Michigan Hospital to address claims of medical malpractice.

• Type: Practice Simulation

This simulation course is a practicum, taught by a veteran federal court, state court and arbitration tribunal trial lawyer, which will take students from the initial drafting of a complaint and answer in a hypothetical commercial case through trial, jury verdict and post-judgment motions. Students, working together both individually and as teams, will strategize the complaint allegations to be filed and the responses to those allegations; will draft pleadings and papers in pursuance of the claims and defenses; will file dispositive motions; will conduct written discovery and depositions; will participate in a pretrial conference; will file and respond to dispositive motions; will attend a pretrial conference and a settlement conference; and will then prepare for and participate in trial, including presentation of voir dire questions and peremptory challenges, opening and closing statements, direct examination and cross-examination, evidentiary objections and responses thereto and motions for directed verdict and responses thereto at the close of proofs. While the course will have some theoretical discussion about the art of persuasion, the primary emphasis will be on a hands-on approach that is designed to mirror, as much as possible, what a student’s experience will be like in prosecuting or defending a commercial case when he or she is a practicing lawyer.
More and more hiring law firms are expecting law students to be as “trial ready” as possible when they enter private practice and join their firms’ litigation departments. This course aims to provide students with that experience.

• Type: Practice Simulation

This course surveys the rapidly evolving law concerning nonhuman animals. Pressing legal questions arise concerning all types of animals, from insects to cetaceans, in contexts ranging from companion animals at home, to factory farms, to zoos and aquariums, to research facilities, to the wild. What is the legal status and standing of animals? What legal duties pertain to their treatment and to other actions that bear upon animals? What legal recognition is afforded to the ways that humans live alongside animals? In answering these questions, animal law intersects with many traditional areas such as property, tort, criminal, regulatory, constitutional, and international law. Animal law fundamentally concerns the practical application of statutory, decisional, and treaty law, and this course is thus primarily doctrinal. But animal law inevitably also raises deep theoretical and ethical questions about the nature of legal rights and interests, the construction of a political community, and the ways that the law responds or fails to respond to vulnerability, power imbalances, and biodegradation

• Type: Upper Class

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly pervasive in areas of legal concern, including lethal autonomous weapons systems (“killer robots”), autonomous vehicles, medical diagnostic algorithms, criminal sentencing, predictive policing, welfare distribution, consumer manipulation, and content moderation. This seminar will provide an introduction to the field of how the law treats AI. We will consider what AI is, how the law shapes its development and regulation generally, and implications in some specific subject matter areas. Please note that we will not focus on AI as a tool of legal practice (e.g., e-discovery). Readings will include legal scholarship, scholarship from other fields, and (to a lesser extent) cases, statutes, regulations, and other materials as appropriate. No technical background is required, but you must be willing to engage with the technology. Class will be centered on robust discussion, with occasional guests, informed by the readings, response papers, and student discussion questions. Students have the option of writing a longer term paper rather than shorter response papers for an additional credit.

• Type: Seminar