What Courses To Expect In The First Year Of Law School?

You may be curious about the courses you'll be taking during your first year.' In most schools these are year-long courses, and they will occupy two or three hours a week of lecture time during both semesters. The contents of each course are described briefly in this article. Even though all the courses follow a symmetrical pattern many a time professors change them according to local requirements or according to their teaching styles.

Hence, even though this will give the law students an idea of what topics are usually covered it is important to bear in mind that professors often adjust curricula to reflect both their own interests and current trends they see as important; owing to which the course content will probably vary somewhat.


Civil Procedure

In the course on civil procedure you will learn procedural law, which is the body of rules that regulate how people sue one another for civil wrongs (as opposed to the "substantive" law, which describes what rights they have in general and when they will be permitted to enforce those rights. In short, this course will teach you how a civil (not criminal) lawsuit works.

The procedural law that you will study in this course will be federal civil procedure, not state. You learn federal law primarily because: (1) you have to learn it sooner or later; and (2) federal procedural law is particularly streamlined and obviously much more uniform than the laws of the various states.

In some schools, there may be a second or third-year course dealing with the civil procedure laws of that state in which the school is located or a state in which prospective graduates will seek employment (such as New York or California). The state course is optional, however, and usually is taken solely for the purposes of preparing for the bar exam.

Constitutional Law:

Basically, constitutional law establishes the essential governmental framework and the rights of individuals. This course is the study of these legal concepts, taught primarily through decisions of the Supreme Court, the final arbiter on constitutional issues.

The major subjects you will learn are the Supreme Court's What's Law School Really Like? It will also teach you about the legal relationships between state governments and the federal government and among the branches of federal government (the courts, Congress, and the president), the powers exercised by the federal government, and the protections afforded to individuals. You may also learn something about the mechanics of Supreme Court practice. These are other topics that are likely to be covered.

Contracts

The concept of the contract, an agreement that can be enforced in court, is so central to our daily personal and professional lives that it is perhaps the most important course in first-year law school. Throughout your legal schooling and your practice, you will continually refer to the material you are taught during the two semesters of contracts class.

Contracts appear literally in every area of law you might practice. Their application to real estate transactions and corporate law is obvious. Contracts also play a large role in tort law and divorce law-through the use of settlement agreements to resolve disputes without going to court-as well as in antitrust law, trust and estate law, taxation, and even some types of criminal law.

Yet even if your specialty doesn't directly involve much contract work, you're sure to receive calls from relatives who've just found that their Florida dream condo is actually an acre of pungent Dade County swamp and who are begging you to find a loophole in their contract.

The course will teach you who can make a contract, what rules must be complied with in order for a contract to be enforceable in court, how the obligations created by a contract arise and are then discharged, and what defenses exist in suits based on contracts. You'll also learn of certain special contractual situations, such as the rules relating to contracts made for the benefit of other people and transfers of rights under a contract.

Criminal Law:

The course on criminal law will teach you the substantive law of crimes (what murder is, for instance), not the law of procedure in criminal actions (how to try someone for murder). This subject is the one you'll probably be the most familiar with going into law school, thanks to television, movies, and novels.

In the crimes course, you will learn the elements to be proved by the prosecuting attorney in order to allow a jury to find a person guilty of a crime, defenses, constitutional requirements for protecting the rights of the accused, and miscellaneous aspects of criminal law, such as statutory construction, sentencing, and social policies to be served by criminal law.

The subject is a fascinating one in itself whether your interest is defense or prosecution. Those of you planning careers in corporate firms, though, shouldn't think you'll never have to deal with criminal law. Often, even in the prestige firms, litigation attorneys have learned their craft as U.S. or state's attorneys, prosecuting criminal cases. Moreover, it's not unusual for corporate clients to get themselves into situations in which it is alleged they have committed some type of white-collar crime.

Legal Research and Writing:

The course on research and writing will teach you the techniques for researching legal issues. It also will give you some experience in preparing the types of documents attorneys work with every day. You will learn what types of legal books and journals exist, how to use them, where to find them, what computers can do for you, what legal services exist and how to use their publications.

The course will familiarize you with the place that will be your home away from home for the rest of your professional life: the law library. You will be given short quizzes or projects, in which you must track down information in a kind of legal treasure hunt.

During the first part of the course (and usually no longer than four to six weeks), you will learn about the sources of the law and where to find them. After that, most schools will have you use these tools to complete two writing projects: (1) a memorandum of law; and (2) a court brief.

The memorandum of law will be the major project of your first semester. In law firm practice, memoranda are the essential means of communicating with other attorneys in the firm and with clients. A memorandum is a lawyer's response to a legal question. "If I haven't signed the contract yet, can 1 get out of it?" "The driver 1 ran into was drunk and speeding. Am I still liable to him?" When presented with one of these questions-either from the attorney you're working for, or from a client directly-your task is to write a memorandum of law that states the facts, the rules of law that you believe would apply to those facts, and then the conclusion.

In preparing the memorandum for your course, you will be given a hypothetical fact pattern and a related legal question. A simple example is this:

John Jones was driving his car late at night when he fell asleep at the wheel. Going 40 mph, the car broke through a barricade that was designed to withstand direct impact of vehicles going 70. The car tumbled down an embankment and struck a propane tank, knocking the tank into a nearby mobile home and setting it on fire. The occupant of the mobile home, Sam Smith, was seriously injured. Mr. Jones is uninsured and bankrupt. Mr. Smith has come to your firm asking if he will succeed in a suit against the maker of the highway barricade. Please write a memorandum of law stating whether or not such a suit will be successful.

In the second semester, your project will be a continuation of your memorandum. You will write an "appellate brief"-not to be confused with a "case brief," which you'll recall is a synopsis of a court decision. An appellate brief is a long document written by the parties to a trial after the trial is over. The brief arises when the loser at the trial complains that the trial court decision was incorrect. The brief is addressed to an appellate court (a court that does not hear trials but whose primary purpose is to correct mistakes made in the trial court). The brief states, in a very stylized format, why the trial court decision was wrong and why the appellate court should overturn that decision. Of course, the other side will write its own brief stating why the trial court was right.

After submitting their appellate briefs to the court, the lawyers for each side have an opportunity to stand up before the judges of the appellate court and present oral arguments, summarizing their major points in the brief. Similarly, the high point of the second semester is an actual oral argument, called a "moot court," in which you will appear before professors or senior students sitting as "judges" and argue the position you have taken.

An appellate brief assignment based on the above memorandum might look something like this:

You have just been notified that a verdict has been rendered in the case o/Smith v. Fred's Highway Barricade Company. The jury found in favor of the barricade company. Your client, Sam Smith, wishes to appeal this decision to the court of appeals. Attached are relevant portions of the trial transcript. Please prepare an appellate brief setting forth all legal arguments why the trial court was in error and why a verdict should be entered in favor of Mr. Smith, or in the alternative, a new trial should be ordered.

Real Property:

The real property course will take you back into the cob-webbed halls of the ancient common law when ownership of land was synonymous with power. The law developed special rules-complex and arcane-to regulate the ownership, use, and transfer of land. Today, although most of the stodgy accoutrements of the old-time law of real property have been discarded, many old rules remain, modified by modem statutes and court decisions. Specifically, you will work your way through the concept of possession of land and objects; the types of rights (called "interests") one can have in real property; the legal nature of the landlord-tenant relationship; the methods by which one can transfer property and protect the parties' interests in the process; newer forms of real estate ownership (co-ops and condos); and the public and private regulation of land use.

Real property courses tend to be more eclectic than others, and your professor may present other concepts in addition to, or in place of, the standard curriculum.

Torts:

The word "tort" comes from the Latin verb meaning "to twist," as in a screw, as in somebody screwed up. A tort is a wrong for which the law provides a civil penalty (as opposed to a criminal one) and that isn't a breach of contract.

A car accident, a plane crash, a slip-and-fall in a building lobby, exploding soda bottles, asbestosis, a careless surgical operation, calling someone a thief when he isn't one, stealing someone's car-these are all torts. (Note that some of them also are crimes.)

In your torts class, you'll learn about "intentional" torts: hitting your neighbor (a battery), scaring your neighbor by almost hitting him (assault), locking him in a closet (false imprisonment), falsely telling him that his beloved pet turtle has died (intentional infliction of emotional distress).

You'll also learn about negligence: when the law imposes liability because of carelessness (as opposed to purposeful conduct) and the defenses to it.

Products liability, a fascinating body of law that combines a number of theories and legal philosophies to protect consumers, will undoubtedly be on your professor's agenda. You'll also learn the law of defamation (libel and slander), misrepresentation, invasion of privacy, and other less common torts.

Variations In Courses:

Although the above-mentioned courses are those most frequently required of students, you may find your school offers a different arrangement of courses, or even different courses altogether.

Some Schools offer, instead of the traditional legal writing and research courses called Lawyering-a six-credit program that includes instruction in drafting-skills, research, client interviewing and counseling, case analysis, and problem handling. There is also an opportunity to work out scenarios en countered in the real legal world through role playing.

For students in the evening division of their law school (generally a four-year program), the required first-year courses are spread out over their first and second year. Most schools also require you to take an ethics course and your school will probably have a few upper-class requirements, such as corporations or wills.