This is a 2-credit class surveying the comprehensive law of nonprofit organizations. The course will begin with an overview of the nonprofit sector and provide an understanding of the various dimensions and rationales for nonprofit organizations. We’ll then dissect the legal framework of these organizations, including formation, dissolution, and restructuring; operation and governance; and state and federal requirements for existence.

This course introduces the theory and practice of negotiation in a workshop setting. We will examine the basic stages of a negotiation; the major tensions at play in negotiation; distributive bargaining, value-creating, and problem-solving techniques; the management of communication and emotional elements in negotiation; power dynamics and ethics; lawyer-client relationships, and other topics as time allows.

Prerequisites: Business Associations (or Corporations)

This seminar will examine a series of legal issues raised by (1) the flow of personal information through social media, (2) the emergence of business models that make money from those information flows, and (3) the role of social media companies as information gatekeepers. Together we will explore the interplay of law (like the rights and freedoms the media enjoy under the First Amendment), and ethics (the professional responsibilities that historically have cabined the exercise of these rights).

The powers, limitations, and special legal rules concerning state and local governments are studied.

This seminar provides students an opportunity to research and discuss a variety of doctrines that can be employed to enable the contract and tort claimants against one entity to access the resources of another entity. Doctrines in various stages of development include alter ego, fraudulent transfer, integrated business, joint venture, nominee, partnership, principal/agent, successor liability, veil piercing. Students will orally present their papers and write after receiving comment from the instructor.

Pre/Co-requisite: The Law, the Classics, and the Scriptures

This course provides a survey of business law topics typically encountered when advising small, new, and entrepreneurial businesses. Topics range from selection of an appropriate business entity type and completing the legal formalities to establish the entity to exits from business ownership. In between students will be exposed to legal issues of importance to entrepreneurs including basic tax considerations, debt and equity finance, employee and independent contractor issues, securing intellectual property rights, typical contract matters, insurance, creditors rights and the UCC.

Economics plays an important role in all areas of the law. This course introduces students to the economic concepts that they will need to know to be effective litigators and transactional lawyers. Among other things, we will address the following questions. How do markets work? What happens when one party to a transaction has an informational or bargaining advantage? How can we tell whether a party is acting rationally or irrationally? How can lawyers use economics to advice clients, draft contracts and make persuasive legal arguments?

This seminar covers legal and ethical issues concerning the visual arts. The seminar brings together many disparate areas of U.S. and international law.

International Law: We will discuss global issues related to plunder, reparations and destructions of works of art; as well as questions of cultural heritage, such as collective ownership of artifacts by nation-states, indigenous groups and others. We will also address the international trade in art.

Intellectual Property: We will study copyright issues, as well as the artist’s “moral rights” over his or her work.