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| Admiralty (Rutherglen, George) This January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course will examine the basic substantive and procedural doctrines in federal maritime law and compare them to analogous doctrines in other areas of law. Among the topics to be covered are: jurisdiction in admiralty, carriage of goods by sea, collision, personal injury and wrongful death, salvage, and piracy. Because of limited class time, the coverage necessarily will be selective, concentrating on the most distinctive and interesting issues in admiralty. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Examination | |
| Applied Problem Solving (Esterhay, John B.; Geis, George S.) This January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course surveys applied problem solving concepts that can be used to find the optimal solution to a given business opportunity or challenge. The course will be useful to anyone interested in learning a structured approach to problem solving, but especially to law students interested in pursuing alternative careers in business, consulting, investment banking, and private equity. The course will involve guest speakers, group activities, and a scenario-based exercise that unfolds over the week, culminating in a live presentation to a panel of distinguished business executives. Students will be assigned to a project team to work together throughout the week. There will be no exam or paper requirement. Instead, grading will be based on class participation and a final in-class presentation. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is required
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Final in-class presentation | |
| Baseball (Setear, John K.) This is a January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course examines the effect of various laws and law-like rules on Major League Baseball. Suitable for non-experts and will include (optional) session aimed at bringing them up to speed. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Paper required | |
| Corporate Law Policy (Barzuza, Michal) This January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course will discuss works on pressing issues in corporate law policy such as misreporting of corporate performance, differences between US and Europe and corporate law reforms. There will be no exam or paper requirement. Instead, students will be asked to submit brief memos on the assigned readings. Some tolerance to economics recommended. NOTE: Laptops prohibited during class sessions. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
PREREQUISITE: Corporations or Corporations (Law & Business)
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Brief memos on the assigned readings | |
| Economic Crisis: Causes And Cures (Kitch, Edmund W.) This January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course surveys the events of the US economic crisis of 2007 to 20?? and proposed regulatory reforms which either have been enacted or are being seriously considered at the time the course meets in January 2009. The presentation will be aimed at students who have not specialized in corporations, finance and securities regulation but who wish to have a basic understanding of these events, which are likely to have a significant impact both on the law and the economy in the future. NOTE: Laptops, cell phones and other electronic communication devices are not to be used in this class. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
PREREQUISITE: Second- or third-year or LLM status
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Examination | |
| Ethical Issues In Foreign Policy (Little, David; Moore, John N.) This January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course will explore ethical issues in foreign policy. The first session will provide an overview of “Ethical Thinking” generally. The next four sessions will explore the ethical implications of four specific foreign affairs decisions and issues. These will include President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, decisions to “stress” detainees for intelligence in the war on terror, the decision to intervene militarily in Iraq in March 2003, and decisions regarding the response of the international community to the crisis in Rwanda in 1994. The class will be co-taught with David Little, Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict at the Harvard Divinity School, one of the nation’s top experts on ethical issues in foreign policy. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Paper required | |
| French Public And Private Law (Gore, Marie) This January Term course meets in Paris January 12-20. This short course will study the following topics: The various sources of French Law (expansion and diversification): French Civil Code, International and European sources, increasing significance of case law and the impact of the European Convention of Human Rights
Towards a European Civil Code: difficulties and perspectives
Jurisdictions and procedural issues
Basic principles of contracts and new directions (good faith), key notions on torts (recent trends in case law) and modern trends in family law (spouse, so-called Pacs, effects of foreign polygamy and repudiation in France, inheritance). ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Examination | |
| Income Taxation Of Trusts And Estates (Robinson, Mildred W.) This is a January Term course meets January 18-22. A study of Subchapter J of Subtitle A of the Internal Revenue Code – the Income Taxation of Trusts and Estates. We will examine the ways in which the process of determining income tax liability for these two taxable entities is the same as that for taxing the income of individuals and the important ways in which the process differs. This short course is not a substitute for Federal Taxation of Gratuitous Transfers. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
PREREQUISITE: Federal Income Tax. Trusts and Estates recommended, but not required
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Examination | |
| Indian Law (Merrill, Richard) This January Term course meets January 18-22. The legal relationships between the Indian tribes and the national government, and between the tribes and the states, define a distinctive but growing body of federal law. This short course will serve as an introduction to this body of law. It will explore several current issues relating to the authority of Indian tribes and the operation of state and federal law within Indian reservations. In the time available, we can cover only selected highlights; many topics covered in the semester-long course that has some years been part of the curriculum won't be treated. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
PREREQUISITE: Constitutional Law recommended, but not required
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Paper required | |
| International Financial Crimes (Dean, Richard N.; Mendelsohn, Mark F.; Stephan, Paul B.) This January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course looks at the criminalization of financial transactions that may arise in the course of operating an international business. We will focus principally on U.S. federal criminal law, although the class also will consider the implementation by other countries of international agreements relating to bribery and money laundering. The class will concentrate on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, money laundering, the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and wire and mail fraud. The class will emphasize the role of private lawyers in advising clients about the prevention of criminal charges and in-house compliance policies, rather than the strategic choices to be made in the course of criminal trials. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
PREREQUISITE: Criminal Law
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Examination | |
| Legal Process: Basic Problems (Harrison, John C.) This January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course will examine the large-scale structure of the legal system, using parts of Hart & Sacks classic work, The Legal Process, which has been immensely influential in the American legal academy and gave rise to a school of thought named after it. The leading theme of the course, and of The Legal Process, is the relationship among different legal institutions, which have their characteristic ways of approaching and resolving legal problems. The main topics will be (1) the nature of legal norms, (2) private ordering as a means of applying law and avoiding legal difficulties and as a source of information about normative practice on which law-makers draw, (3) courts and the elaboration of legal norms in the process of applying them, (4) the legislative process and its connection with statutory construction, and (5) executive power and decision making. Although a one-hour course will not be able to examine any of these topics in depth (certainly not in the depth in which the full Hart & Sacks materials do), the shorter time and more compressed schedule should make it possible to keep in mind the similarities and differences among differing parts of the legal system; those similarities and differences are the topic. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Examination | |
| Personal Injury Law (O'Connell, Jeffrey) This January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course begins by examining in detail the trial of a typical personal injury case, tried by a young lawyer right out of law school, from claim investigation, pleadings, discovery, trial, post-trial motions, and appeal, focusing on both legal doctrines and tort litigation strategy. The course further examines both tort law theory (e.g., deterrence versus compensation) and its practical operations (e.g., jury selection as a means of understanding both the workings of tort law, and its merits as well as its demerits). The course then takes up the merits and demerits of both relatively limited and more extensive proposals for tort reform as applied to medical malpractice and product liability. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
PREREQUISITE: Torts
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Examination | |
| Plea Bargaining (Bowers, Josh) This January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course will focus on plea bargaining and the guilty plea system. In modern America, the criminal trial is a rarity. In some jurisdictions, it is practically nonexistent. Instead, almost all cases are resolved by guilty pleas, typically entered into after some form of plea bargaining. We will survey the variety of practices collectively defined as plea bargaining. We will discuss plea bargaining’s perceived advantages and disadvantages: whether, on the one hand, it unduly sacrifices accuracy and formality for the good of expediency; or, on the other hand, whether it facilitates compromise in arenas where adversarial heavy combat is less than optimal. We will explore the degree to which plea bargaining has affected the roles and responsibilities of judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys; and we will examine the different contexts in which these changes make more or less sense. Additionally, we will analyze whether plea bargains successfully reflect probable trial outcomes, or, instead, whether cognitive biases and institutional arrangements and pressures lead parties to reach agreements outside the shadow of law and trial. Finally, we will evaluate the adequacy of efforts to regulate, reform, and/or abolish plea bargaining. The grade will be based on short analysis papers and class participation. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Several short response papers | |
| Search Engines (Vaidhyanathan, Siva) This January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course examines the legal and policy implications of the growing importance of search engines in society. It will consider the major conflicts over intellectual property, anti-trust, and privacy law. It will also consider the ways that search engines have altered habits and expectations among Web users. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is required
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Paper required | |
| Secondary Liability For Copyright Infringement (Oliar, Dotan) This January Term course meets January 18-22. In this short course we will review a longstanding debate in copyright law: what indirect liability for copyright infringement should be imposed on manufacturers of new technologies? This question has come up repeatedly over the past century regarding technologies such as mechanical piano players, radio, xerography, television, VCR and most recently peer-to-peer networks. In each of these cases, courts and lawmakers supplied different answers. We will review these cases, read what scholars had to say about them, and think about the question systematically. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is required
PREREQUISITE: Copyright Law or Patent Law or Survey of Patent, Copyright, Trademark
MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE with: Advanced Issues in Intellectual Property Policy
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Daily response papers and a final in-class presentation | |
| Selected Topics In Consumer Bankruptcy (Hynes, Richard M.; Walt, Steven D.) This January Term course meets January 18-22. American consumers filed more than one million bankruptcy petitions each year from 1996 to 2005. In 2005 Congress adopted bankruptcy reforms designed to discourage filing, and the number of petitions dropped by more than seventy percent. Now, however, bankruptcy filings are rising again, and Congress may pass new reforms that will make bankruptcy dramatically more attractive to millions of Americans. An understanding of consumer bankruptcy will help attorneys who will counsel individual clients and attorneys who counsel businesses who lend or sell to individuals. This short course will examine selected topics in consumer bankruptcy and insolvency. Topics may include: i) the treatment of insolvent debtors outside of bankruptcy; ii) general bankruptcy provisions affecting consumers; iii) Chapter 7; iv) Chapter 13; and v) proposals for reform. Grading will be based on a final exam. Although there will be some overlap with Secured Transactions and Bankruptcy, there are no pre-requisites for this course. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Examination | |
| Textualism And Its Critics (Bress, Daniel A.; Schwartzman, Micah J.) This January Term course meets January 18-22. This short course will examine textualism as a method of statutory interpretation. We will address the following questions: What is textualism? What are the arguments for it? And what are the arguments against? In discussing these questions, we will consider the goals of statutory interpretation, the nature of legislative intention, and the value of various legal sources in determining the meaning of enacted law. Readings will include judicial opinions and articles written by prominent textualists and their critics (e.g., Scalia, Easterbrook, Breyer and Dworkin). ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
COURSE REQUIREMENT: A three-page response paper and an eight-page critique | |
| Trial Advocacy College (Saltzburg, Stephen A.) The Trial Advocacy College is scheduled Friday January 8 - Thursday January 14, in 2010. (Law school January Term classes are scheduled January 18-22.) FEE: $200.00. Included in this fee are the course case files, a hardbound advocacy textbook, your personal videotapes, two cocktail parties (January 9 and 11), and six lunches. DESCRIPTION: The 29th Annual Trial Advocacy College (National Trial Advocacy College) is offered through the offices of Virginia Continuing Legal Education (CLE) in cooperation with the Law School. More than 100 lawyers from around the country will attend; 50 additional places in the College are reserved for Virginia third-year law students. The Director of the Institute, Stephen A. Saltzburg, is the Wallace and Beverley Woodbury University Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School and a former Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. He co-founded the College in 1982. The faculty consists of some of America’s best trial lawyers and outstanding judges. The College represents the most advanced advocacy training available through the Law School and has been widely regarded as one of the best programs in the country for more than 20 years. This is an advocacy skills, hands-on course. Classes are limited to eight and each student gets to practice every aspect of advocacy, culminating in a trial before a real jury, January 13-14. Successful completion requires regular attendance, preparation, and effort. The course is graded on a credit/no-credit basis. The National Trial Advocacy College web site (www.trialadcollege.org/) has additional information, including video clips. ENROLLMENT PROCEDURE: Students will enroll through the normal course enrollment process. Enrollment will be managed by the Student Records Office in coordination with Virginia CLE. After December 2nd, absolutely NO DROPS will be permitted. PREREQUISITE: Third-year status, Evidence, and one of the following: Trial Advocacy, the Criminal Defense Clinic or one semester of the yearlong Prosecution Clinic
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Regular attendance, preparation, and effort | |
| Virginia And The Constitution (Howard, A E.) This January Term course meets January 18-22. In the 400 years since its first settlement, Virginia has been intimately intertwined with the central themes of American constitutionalism – the idea of rights, the balance between national and state power, the nature of religious liberty, the problem of race and discrimination, etc. In this short course, we will consider selected persons, documents, and events which illuminate those themes. Examples include the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786), James Madison’s Virginia Plan (1787), the nationalist opinions of John Marshall, the Prince Edward County litigation, and Virginia’s own Constitutions, especially that of 1902 and the present Constitution. Each student will be asked to choose and to read one book, such as a biography of a major Virginian (Jefferson, Madison, Marshall, etc.) or a book on some aspect of Virginia history relevant to constitutional development. The course’s paper requirement will take the form of an essay on that book. ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT: Attendance at all class sessions is expected
COURSE REQUIREMENT: Paper required | |
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