This course focuses on the practical execution of everyday legal writing across the complete lifecycle of a dispute. Tracking a single case file from the initial intake through investigation, litigation, and final resolution, students engage in both targeted weekly micro-assignments and select comprehensive drafting projects. Through exercises such as client communications, contract redlining, discovery drafting, and motion practice, students build the professional agility required to write clearly, concisely, and persuasively for diverse legal audiences.

The United States is composed of Native governments, alongside state governments and the federal government. Each of those governmental categories has claimed autonomy or semi-autonomy from each other under different circumstances. This seminar uses legal history to understand the intersection of Native, state, and federal governments over time, applying a strong presumption that every good idea about the future will require familiarity with the past.

This seminar will focus on recent developments in the law of capacity. To exercise legal capacity, individuals must have decision-making capacity. Some individuals have cognitive impairments that render them “incompetent” or “incapacitated,” and they are not permitted to exercise legal capacity contemporaneously. Decisions affecting their lives (and that have legal consequences) instead will be made by someone else (e.g., guardian, agent, family member, etc.) or via advance directive.

Hard Questions in Evidence is a seminar for students interested in going beyond the rules of admissibility to explore some of the deepest and most pressing questions in evidence law nowadays. We will ask whether traditional doctrines such as hearsay, character evidence, and expert-evidence rules still make sense, how evidence law should respond to the decline of jury trials and the rise of AI and other new technologies, and whether the Federal Rules of Evidence (which were launched in 1975) themselves remain still the best way to structure legal proof.

This 2-credit seminar course focuses on trademark practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Topics include selecting trademarks, conducting trademark searches, preparing and filing trademark applications, prosecution of applications, responding to rejections, maintaining registrations, and opposition/cancellation practice before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB).

This course provides an overview of international commercial arbitration as an alternative dispute resolution method for solving cross-border disputes. It examines the principles and procedures that govern international arbitration, including arbitration agreements, jurisdiction, the key tribunals, evidentiary hearings, and enforcement of arbitral awards. The course will also review major international arbitration rules and conventions, and the roles and responsibilities of arbitrators and counsel.

This course provides an in-depth examination of the legal and commercial issues that shape sports-related transactions. Students will study the “anatomy” of sports business transactions and contracts, including common, fundamental standard (“boilerplate”) contract clauses and special clauses.

The purpose of this course is to engage students in deep analysis of the prison system in the U.S., with a focus on the Florida system. As the authors of one text note, prisons affect everyone and all law students should have some knowledge of the related law. We will examine the origins and goals of prisons in the U.S. (incapacitation, deterrence, punishment, and rehabilitation) and evaluate the effectiveness of prisons in achieving these goals. We will explore the reality of prison life using non-fiction accounts and if possible, guest lecturers and visits to local prisons.

This course addresses critical but traditionally neglected areas of legal education by equipping students with practical skills and knowledge essential for sustainable, effective, and humane legal practice. While particularly relevant for students interested in criminal law practice, the course content applies across all areas of law and focuses on developing lawyers who can maintain rewarding client relationships, achieve better outcomes for clients, and sustain fulfilling careers and lives.

The course will focus on the regulation of banks, mutual funds, securities and derivatives market intermediaries, and insurance companies. The course will cover a broad range of subject areas, including jurisdictional issues, practical regulatory requirements, and obligations imposed on various financial institutions by federal and state law.