One of the hallmarks of being a student at Michigan Law is the unusual level of access to and interaction with professors. The mini-seminar program takes that experience to a whole new level.
If you thought you knew your favorite professors before, consider the insights you’ll have after you’ve had dinner at their houses while their children run around in diapers. And for the reserved student who has avoided more than cursory visits to office hours, the mini-seminar presents the perfect opportunity to take advantage of one of the most special features of our community.
Implemented in 2005, the program has proved enormously popular with students and faculty alike. The mini-seminars capitalize on both the Law School’s unique physical environment, where most faculty live within a stone’s throw of the Quadrangle, and our ethos of collegiality, to provide a new venue for personal connections between students and faculty in a casual forum.
For one ungraded credit, groups of 10 or 12 students meet with a professor (or two) over the course of a semester (or in some cases, the entire academic year) to hold provocative conversations in a series of two-hour sessions in the professor’s home or some other non-classroom setting. Some 1L mini-seminars offer no credit.
The seminar’s theme is faculty-selected—often intensively law-focused, balanced by a handful of topics that might be described as marginally legal. About 15 mini-seminars are offered each year.
2026-2027 Mini-seminar Topics
Fall
- Art and Advocacy (Prof. Patrick Barry)
- Contemporary Hidden Figures: Today’s Unsung Legal Champions of Democracy and Economic Justice (Prof. Dana Thompson)
- Criminal Justice Reform by Comedian John Oliver (Prof. Imran Syed)
- Law and the Supernatural (Prof. Hannah Walser)
- The Law of Middle Earth (Prof. Dan Crane)
- Leadership Bootcamp (Prof. Tifani Sadek)
- Lemonade: Race, Resilience, and … Beyoncé (Prof. Jenna Cobb)
- The Life of a Big Law Attorney (Prof. Christopher Knight)
- Litigation Against the Second Trump Administration (Prof. Richard Friedman)
- What the Media Gets Right (and Wrong) About Consumer Finance and Law (Prof. Belisa Pang)
- Women in the Legal Profession (Prof. Rachel Rothschild)
Fall 2026 Mini-seminar Information
Winter
2L/3Ls
- Anishinaabe Inaakonigewin (Law) in Tribal Court Practice (Prof. Matthew Fletcher)
- Climate Change and Human Rights (Prof. Karima Bennoune)
- Crossing the Divide: Civil Discourse and Civil Disobedience in Polarized America (Prof. Jessica Lefort)
- The Federal Reserve (Prof. Jeffery Zhang)
- The “Law” of Admissions (Prof. Sam Erman)
- Lawyering in Washington, DC (Prof. Chris Walker)
- Learning the Law by Avoiding It (Prof. David Santacroce)
- Mind Control in Dystopian Fiction (Prof. Gabe Mendlow)
- What Can Short Stories Teach Us About Life, Law, and Life Within the Law? (Prof. Steve Schaus)
- What’s Love Got to Do With It: Emotion and the Practice of Law (Prof. Debra Chopp)
Winter 2027 Mini-seminar Information for 2Ls and 3Ls
1Ls
- Lawyering When the Law is Against You (Prof. Paulina Arnold)
- The Life of a People’s Lawyer: Using the Law to Advance Social Justice (Prof. Michael Steinberg)
- Restorative Practices for Lawyers (Profs. Bridgette Carr and Vivek Sankaran)
- Should I Stay or Should I Go? (Prof. Julian Davis Mortenson)
- “The Hellish and dismall cloud”: sea coal bans, slaughterhouse zones, and other early environmental laws from the Middle Ages (Prof. Oday Salim)