CU Law Profiles
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Constitutional Law How current law emerged from American constitutional history, and the importance of structure

Property History and the role of lawyers in the law of property

Local Government The Colorado Constitution and local government

American Indian Law The place of Indian nations in our constitutional scheme

Legal Aid & Defender Program: Criminal This clinical course is designed to teach students about criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, ethics and advocacy by having them represent clients in court. The students, pursuant to the student practice rule of the Colorado Supreme Court, represent people charged with misdemeanor and traffic offenses in Boulder County Court and in the various municipal courts in Boulder County. The students handle the cases from first appearance, through filing of charges, motions practice, plea negotiation and, if necessary, trial.

Wrongful Convictions Clinic Students in this clinical course work with me and other lawyers from the Colorado Innocence Project examining the claims of Colorado inmates that they are innocent, notwithstanding the fact that their convictions have been affirmed through all of the usual appellate court processes. We examine the files and transcripts of these clients to determine whether there are avenues of investigation that were not pursued, whether there were errors made by previous counsel, and whether there are new forensic technologies, such as the use of DNA evidence, that can be brought to bear on the case to establish a cognizable claim of innocence.

Evidence This class teaches the law of evidence, that is, what evidence is admissible in a trial and how that evidence may be presented. I try to teach the course not just as a theoretical discussion of the law evidence, but as a combination of theory and practice.

Family Law This course is about getting married and getting divorced. It takes all semester to get through the many issues associated with these topics. The class always generates very lively discussions and students do hands-on work, including a two-day divorce negotiation exercise.

Immigration and Citizenship Law This course is largely about the admission and removal of aliens, but we also touch upon citizenship law, asylum and refugee law, and issues concerning immigration and national security. Every day we discuss challenging legal and policy issues. Even students with no interest in immigration law should take the class because it will make the student a better lawyer -- we read statutes very carefully, tackle very complex constitutional issues, and discuss the policy aspects of the law on a regular basis.

Parent, Child and State This course is about state regulation of the family. We address the rights of parents and children to freedom of expression and religious exercise, termination of parental rights and adoption, paternity rights, the state's response to child abuse and neglect, the role of race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and culture in defining the family, the legal issues raised by the development of new reproductive technologies, and current debates about the appropriate division of responsibility in family law between the federal and state governments. This is a terrific class for anyone interested in the family and/or constitutional law.

Civil Procedure
I?m hoping my colleagues will forgive me for saying that Procedure is the most important course in lawschool. Almost everyone who enters lawschool has ideas about when or whether a person should be able to recover because of a tort like negligence or libel, or because of a breach of contract, or because of a violation of civil liberties, but almost nobody comes to lawschool with any sense of what a system of procedure looks like or ought to look like. From the beginnings of Procedure, which involves pleadings (complaint and answer) to the end of procedure, which involves looking at appeals and res judicata (the finality of judgments), the details of our procedural system come as news to students. In the beginning, Procedure is almost counterintuitive, but by the end of the course everyone acquires a new set of intuitions, and there?s no going back. Show me a student who has taken about half a semester of Procedure, and I?ll show you a student who has left innocence behind. If you are that student, it is still possible that you?ll decide not to become a lawyer (although you probably won?t decide that), but even if you abandon the road to becoming a lawyer, you have already crossed the Rubicon and you will never see the world with the same eyes again. You have looked at questions that you didn?t even know to ask, and now you?ll always see them, and you?ll have lots of answers for your nonlawyer friends when you talk about well-known cases at parties or other social occasions. You are not who you were when you started lawschool.

Procedure is multiple stories. One of the stories is about providing fair but not endless procedural opportunities to the parties. Another story is about having rules that are functional rather than wooden, but even functional rules have dysfunctional aspects and very often the question is whether to bend a bit in the interest of achieving a good result or refuse to bend and penalize a party who may have a good case: The reason is that if you have rules, then there must be some consequence for not abiding by the rules, and yet enforcing procedural rules may keep a case from going forward. In a broad sense, the reason Mellville?s Billy Budd is a compelling story is that it asks the question whether a rule that seems to be working badly should be enforced anyway, which is the same problem that proceduralists face every day. Another story in Procedure is federalism ? when should state courts defer to federal courts, and when should federal courts defer to state courts? When should state law give way to federal law, and when should federal law give way to state law? (For some, by the way, state law always gives way, and state courts always do, but if that?s literally and always the way it should be, why exactly do we have states, and why state courts?) Another story in Procedure is the interplay between lawyers and judges, and how the two branches of the profession, thrown into the same boat in every lawsuit, function together. Yet another story in Procedure is how lawyers function as lawyers: It comes as something of a shock that lawyers represent clients rather than justice, and that lawyers actively work to create litigation. And of course another story in Procedure is how judges function: It comes as something of a shock that judges have extraordinary power, even while they struggle through each day (especially in the state systems) with too little resources.

Evidence
Evidence law is the second-most important course in lawschool (and once again I hope my colleagues in other disciplines can forgive me for making this claim). It is a combination of intuition, experience, and doctrine that has a kind of formal beauty but endless problems of application. Like Procedure, the law of evidence is partly about giving parties a fair opportunity to present their cases, but not endless opportunities. But Evidence law takes over where Procedure (and its sibling on other side of the docket, Criminal Procedure) leave off ? Evidence supplies the rules of actually trying cases.

The key to the hardest part of Evidence law is understanding the difference between the assertive quality of language (its ability simply to serve as vessels containing information) and the performative quality of language (its ability to shape the world and to do everything from committing crimes to shaping relationships). The key to relevance is in understanding the rules governing character evidence, and the hard part is seeing the difference between character as a general quality with predictive power and particular aspects of character with stronger (and more accepted) predictive power. The key to impeachment is in recognizing the different ways that credibility can be brought into question, and the big challenge is in regulating impeachment by contradiction, which seems to operate almost outside the legal rules, but is actually subject to some particular rules of its own. Second after hearsay in terms of difficulty is the area of presumptions, which in criminal cases operate as a thumb on the scales of justice favoring prosecutors, and in civil cases as devices that get around difficulties in proof and implement substantive policies.

Contracts: For me Contracts is a great opportunity to think about the relationship between the state and the individual. Put differently, contracts is really about private ordering--in what ways should the state regulate how individuals order their affairs with others? Should the state let people buy and sell anything they like (including kidneys, tissue, sexual intimacy, etc.?), or should it step in and forbid certain transactions? If the latter, how should it do that? And how should the rules of our laws structure exchange to make it both fair and economically efficient? These are hard questions, and fun. They have great implications not only for economics and your understanding of economics, but for human relationships and the way our society structures those relationships.

Legal Negotiation: This is an upper level course. It focuses on the theory and practice of negotiation. In other words, we cover the economics, psychology, and law of negotiation, but we also focus on individual skills. Are you a good negotiator, and what does that mean? What is required to negotiate well? Through simulations and exercises students get to apply the theory of bargaining to actual experiences, and to test what works and what doesn't.

Legal Ethics and Professionalism: This is a second-year course. It focuses on several things. First, there are some key legal ethics rules that we cover--particularly dealing with confidentiality and conflicts of interest. But we cover those rules against a larger backdrop of hard questions about the lawyer's role and the adversary system Does a lawyer's role insulate her from moral critique? If so, why? And ot what extent? If not, why not? These are questions that students often haven't thought about all that much, but they are important. We also talk about the even larger questions of professionalism that are often skipped over in law school. What does it take to be a happy lawyer? Why are so many unhappy, addicted, or struggling? How does moral development occur in a legal career? Can you train that development to avoid moral dilemmas or pitfalls while simultaneously enriching your experience as a lawyer?

Criminal Law: This required, first-year class analyzes the criminal law from a variety of perspectives. We study the reasons for punishing convicted criminals, as well as the elements of crimes and the defenses that the accused might raise. We also examine tensions between various state statutes, the common law, and the Model Penal Code.

Criminal Procedure?Investigative Phase: This course explores the constitutional limits of police practices at the pretrial stage of a criminal investigation. Our central texts are the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and the Supreme Court?s interpretation of these Amendments. This course involves constitutional interpretation and analysis of Supreme Court jurisprudence, rather than simple memorization of rules and statutory provisions.

History of Anglo-American Criminal Justice: This course covers the history of Anglo-American criminal justice from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Some important areas of inquiry include: Colonial American criminal justice and its English roots; the evolution of juries, evidence law, defendant's rights and other aspects of adversarial criminal trial practice; changing theories of punishment; the professionalization of policing and prosecution; and the role of women and ethnic minorities in the criminal process. Most topics are considered with relation to both the United States and England.

Gender, Law, and Public Policy: This seminar examines the relationship between law and gender in such substantive areas as criminal law, education law, and constitutional law. Using feminist theoretical perspectives as an organizing principle for readings and discussion, we consider the strengths and limitations of theory as a tool for changing legal doctrine and public policy.

Domestic Violence: This course covers the law, policy, history, and theory of domestic violence. We examine the limits of legal methods and remedies for holding batterers accountable and keeping victims safe. The class examines such topics as the dynamics of abusive relationships; the history of the criminal justice system?s response to domestic violence; the defenses available to battered persons who kill their abusers; the legal paradigm of the sympathetic victim; psychological and feminist theories about abusive relationships; civil rights and tort liability for batterers and third parties; and the intersection of domestic violence with international human rights.

Torts: As this is a first semester course, we spend a fair amount of time learning to read cases and practicing some fairly basic operations of legal reasoning and legal interpretation. Soon, however, the class turns to issues of policy, fact characterization, and rhetoric. The thing that's great about torts is that everyone in the class pretty much understands the nature of the transactions (i.e. accidents, medical malpractice, product injuries, etc.). That shared background allows us to move fairly quickly to interesting questions about basic legal ideas such as duty, causation, and the nature of wrongs.

Jurisprudence: All about the recursive patterns and conflicts that shape American law.

Constitutional Law: The piece de resistance in American legal thought. An opportunity to encounter the great struggles and mythic ideals of American legal and political life through the artifacts of Supreme Court opinions.

With respect to all my classes ? My focus is on problem-solving. A lawyer?s role is to look at legal issues as a problem solver and counselor. This means students should explore and question the ?law? through contextual and relational lenses.

Telecommunications Law Discusses the regulatory challenges in facilitating competition in the wireline, wireless, video, and Internet industries.

Introduction to Intellectual Property Examines the structure of our nation's intellectual property laws.

The Law and Economics of the Information Age (seminar) Considers the broad array of legal and economic issues that confront the information industries.

Privacy, Security, and Digital Rights Management Covers the law governing the protection of information, including personal privacy, computer security, and digital content

Criminal Law: This is a basic introduction to substantive criminal law. It is required, so I don't have to give any pitch why one should take it.

Labor Law: This course is about the law as it relates to organized labor. It offers an introduction to statutory interpretation and the workings of administrative agencies while also highlighting the politics of law and the role of courts, especially, in imposing their politics into the workings of the law.

I also teach various seminars, most on the theme of the intersection of class, labor, and law.

Externships: The externships provide students with an opportunity to experience the law from a practical experiential base. Students get to work with practicing attorneys, judges, and professors to get first-hand knowledge of the working world of law.

Legal Drafting in Spanish for Family Law: This is a hands-on class where students study the statutes in preparation for working with Spanish-speaking clients who do not have access to the legal system without the assistance of bilingual attorneys. Students translate documents and statutes and role-play interviews and proceedings involving family issues.