Upper-Level Electives
Recommended Foundation Courses
The faculty strongly encourages enrollment in the following foundation courses. These courses are foundations for other advanced electives and are considered part of the core of a well-rounded legal education. Students are urged to enroll in these courses, along with the required courses in Evidence and Professional Responsibility, in the second year of law study. Enrolling in these courses in the second year will not only lay the foundation for more advanced courses in the third year, but also result in fewer conflicts in scheduling classes and exams in both the second and third years.
- Business Associations
- Decedents' Estates and Trusts & Future Interests
- Civil Procedure II
- Taxation of Individual Income
Additional Course Suggestions
The following additional courses are not as universally considered a part of the core curriculum, but they are nevertheless important classes for many students, as described below. They are also commonly tested on state bar examinations. Thus, while these are not classes that all students would typically take, they are classes to which students should give careful consideration in planning their upper level curriculum. Remedies and Conflict of Laws are courses best studied in the third year of law school. The others are feasible in either the second or third year.
Administrative Law
A high percentage of contemporary law practice involves administrative agencies. It is an important body of law to understand in relationship to regulated industries, environmental regulations, health care, business regulations, and a wide variety of social services.
Conflict of Laws
The heart of the Conflicts class is the problem of choosing the law to apply to a transaction or occurrence that crosses state lines. Many transactions or occurrences are entirely local. Often, when a transaction or occurrence touches more than one state, the laws of the involved states happen to be in agreement. But a growing number of multistate transactions or occurrences involve conflicts between the potentially applicable laws. When this happens, the resulting problems are often quite difficult to resolve. For students who may engage in a practice representing clients involved in activities on a multistate or multinational basis, Conflict of Laws can be a very important class.
Family Law
For the general practitioner, Family Law is often a significant element of the practice. The course covers a broad range of issues involving families, including such matters as marriage, divorce, parent-child relationships, paternity, adoption, child custody and visitation, and support obligations and enforcement. For law students who wish to go into general practice or to specialize in family law, or who are unsure of what sort of practice they might undertake after graduation, this class can be important to their legal training.
Payment Systems
This class often appears on bar exam subject lists as Commercial Paper of Negotiable Instruments. It covers Uniform Commercial Code articles 3, 4, and 5, concerning negotiable instruments, bank deposits and collections, regulation of other payment devices such as credit cards and electronic fund transfers, and letters of credit.
Real Estate Transactions
This class focuses on the residential real estate transaction, including the duties of broker and lawyer, financing arrangements, including mortgages, trust deeds and installment land contracts, the contract for sale of land, deeds, land descriptions, recording acts and title examination and protection. These topics are significant to those students who might engage in a general practice after graduation.
Remedies
This course surveys the law of remedies in civil litigation, exploring the most significant alternatives available to civil litigants-- compensatory and punitive damages; equitable relief, including injunctions and specific performance; legal, equitable and specific restitution; rescission; and reformation. The course considers remedies from a problem-solving perspective and as a set of choices made by clients and their lawyers.
Prerequisites
One factor students should consider in course selection is whether a desired course requires a prerequisite course. Prerequisites are listed at the end of each course description.
Bar Examination Subjects
Each state determines the subjects to be tested on its bar examination. Students should not feel compelled to enroll in every course tested on a bar examination, but for the student who plans to practice law, bar examination subjects should be a factor in course selection. Information about subjects tested by each state is available in our Career Services Office and online at www.barbri.com.
