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.
2024-2025 Mini-seminar Topics
Fall
- American Ecological Writings (Prof. Nicolas Cornell)
- Art and Advocacy (Prof. Patrick Barry)
- Branches of Power: Forests, Law, and Democracy (Prof. Oday Salim)
- Feral Unicorns: Corporate Governance Failures at VC-Backed Startups (Prof. Kristen Wolff)
- Immigrant Narratives: Understanding Border Politics (Prof. Elizabeth Campbell)
- The Law of Middle Earth (Prof. Dan Crane)
- Mishnah (Prof. Richard Primus)
- Reparations, Compensation, and Remedial Justice (Prof. Margo Schlanger)
- What Can Short Stories Teach Us About Life, Law, and Life Within the Law (Prof. Steve Schaus)
Year-Round (Fall/Winter)
- Great Speeches (Prof. Julian Mortenson)
- Hollywood, Bollywood and the Law: The Globalizing Entertainment Industry (Prof. Vic Khanna)
- Hot Topics in Cannabis Law (Profs. Howard Bromberg and Mark Osbeck)
- Lawyering in Washington, DC (Prof. Chris Walker)
- Lawyers as Leaders (Prof. Tifani Sadek)
- Litigating Indian Law Cases in the Supreme Court (Prof. Matthew Fletcher)
- What Do Professors Do in the Summer? (Prof. Emily Prifogle)
- What’s Love Got to Do With It: Emotion and the Practice of Law (Prof. Debra Chopp)
- Women in the Legal Profession (Prof. Rachel Rothschild)
Fall 2024 Mini-seminar Information
Winter
2L/3Ls
- Administrative Law in the Biden Administration (Prof. Sam Bagenstos)
- Asian Pacific Americans and the Law (Prof. Julia Lee)
- Climate Change and Human Rights (Prof. Karima Bennoune)
- Context (Prof. Mira Edmonds)
- Criminal Justice Reform by Comedian John Oliver (Prof. Imran Syed)
- The Federal Reserve (Prof. Jeffery Zhang)
- The First Amendment and LGBTQ Rights (Prof. Spencer Smith)
- Foundational Texts in International Law: Simma’s From Bilateralism to Community Interest (Profs. Julian Arato and Julianne Marley)
- Friends in Law (Prof. Albert Pak)
- Hidden Figures: Unsung Legal Heroes (Prof. Dana Thompson)
- Law School Admissions in a Post-Affirmative Action World (Prof. Sam Erman)
- Learning the Law by Avoiding It (Prof. David Santacroce)
- Sustaining Yourself So You Can Serve Others: How to Flourish and Address Burnout While Working on Tough Issues (Profs. Bridgette Carr and Vivek Sankaran)
- The Trolley Problem and Other Moral Puzzles (Prof. Scott Hershovitz)
Winter 2025 Mini-seminar Information for 2Ls and 3Ls
1Ls
- Abraham Lincoln and Legal Ethics (Prof. Ted Becker)
- In Courts Where Ghosts Appear: The Salem Witch Trials (Prof. Len Niehoff)
- The Life of a People’s Lawyer: Using the Law to Advance Social Justice (Prof. Michael Steinberg)
- Who Prosecutes for Lady Justice? — DOJ 101 (Prof. Luis C.deBaca)