AI & The Law: This course examines the transformative and increasingly fraught relationship between artificial intelligence and legal systems, with a particular focus on generative AI and its implications for privacy, security, civil liberties, and professional responsibility. As AI technologies evolve rapidly and embed themselves in both legal practice and everyday life, students will critically evaluate the legal frameworks that govern their development and deployment—from constitutional and statutory protections to regulatory gaps and emerging jurisprudence.
Key topics include data protection and surveillance law, algorithmic bias and discrimination, intellectual property, the automation of legal services, and the ethical responsibilities of lawyers in an AI-integrated world. Special attention will be given to generative AI tools, including their practical uses in legal research, drafting, and client service. Students will engage directly with these tools in controlled and reflective exercises designed to cultivate both technical fluency and critical awareness.
The course is designed with flexibility for students who have concerns about data privacy or environmental sustainability. Alternative assignments and tool configurations will be available, ensuring that students can meaningfully participate without compromising their ethical commitments. No prior technical background is required.
Lawyering Skills I: This course covers the forms of writing commonly associated with legal practice, including the objective/predictive writing styles found in legal memoranda. This course will introduce you to the language and culture of law and provide you with a foundation for your work in the legal profession. Most immediately, this course will help you to successfully navigate the first-year of law school as we practice analyzing and writing about the law and applying the law to solve legal problems. This course will also prepare you for legal practice by strengthening your problem solving and communication skills.
Lawyering Skills II: This course teaches how to perform two of the most valuable and sophisticated lawyering skills – writing an appellate brief and arguing orally before a court. These skills are essential for effective advocacy and for competent professional representation of clients. This class will build on the material from Lawyering Skills I about legal research, analysis, and writing as we cover new material about written and oral advocacy. By the end of this semester, students will have written an appellate brief and presented an oral argument. Students will have also gained the professional skills described below, as well as a sense of professional achievement that justifies the commitment required by this course.
Law, Rhetoric, & Public Policy: This course examines the relationship between rhetoric, public policy, and the law and explores key rhetorical theories, with an emphasis on the constitutive nature of the law. The class investigates ways in which laws are shaped by and help to shape public perception and policy. Students engage in a semester-long research project culminating in a seminar paper in which they apply a rhetorical lens to an important legal issue of their choosing.
Legal Research and Writing I: Introduction to legal research skills and preparation of objective memoranda. Each student is required to research two different legal problems and to prepare memoranda analyzing the problems. Instructors conduct individual conferences after students have prepared draft memoranda. Following the conferences, students revise their drafts into final memoranda.
Legal Research and Writing: Special section for international LLM students.
Legal Research and Writing II: Additional instruction in legal research skills and introduction to persuasive writing and oral argument. Each student must research a legal problem, prepare an appellate brief based on analysis of the issues, and participate in an oral argument. Students again receive individual conferencing on their draft briefs before preparing the final version.
Independent Supervised Research.
Interpretation and Argument
Privacy, Technology and the Law
By the People, For the People? Activism, Slactivism and Social Media
Race, Identity and Policy
Writing about Public Problems
Writing in the Professions