First-Year Teachers

The first-year curriculum provides a base of analytic, doctrinal, and skills approaches that enable our students in their second and third years to study advanced topics in the law and to take advantage of increasingly complex practical opportunities. The first-year faculty approach the curriculum in different ways, and across a spectrum of interpretive approaches. Although not every faculty member introduces every approach into his or her lecture course, our students experience a range of perspectives in their first year. Themes that are covered include:

Substance of the Law

Much of law establishes the rights and responsibilities among individual members of society. Historically, tort law, chiefly through trespass and nuisance law described the implicit duties individuals owe one another as strangers wholly apart from consent. These are principally duties not to harm. Starting in the nineteenth century tort law placed a far greater emphasis on harms that arose out of consensual relations – occupier’s liability, industrial accidents, medical malpractice and product liability, where it is uncertain the extent to which parties can contract out their harm-based liability to each other. Contracts addresses an extension of duties beyond those to refrain from harm; through contract, individuals voluntarily incur duties upon themselves, typically as part of an exchange, above and beyond the background duties owed as a matter of tort law. On the positive side, each of these courses also introduces students to the role of law in the creation and preservation of wealth, including through commerce. It also examines the ways in which contract and regulation can lead to a reduction in overall wealth. The study of such role addresses basic concepts (and moral criticisms) of capitalism as well as rudimentary business principles such as those of accounting and finance (principles employed more thoroughly later in courses such as Corporations and Securities Law). Only through understanding each of these bodies of law can a student glimpse a complete picture of the rules that govern interactions among society members.

Another important function of law is to establish the rules through which the government regulates and constrains the actions of individuals. For instance, where tort law provides individuals insufficient means to deter or to punish transgressions, the material studied in Legislation and the Regulatory State and in Criminal Law fill the void with governmental sanctions that are deemed too intrusive to be wielded by individuals. The criminal law is also the means through which society expresses moral condemnation for behavior, and as such the course in Criminal Law is the means through which students learn to contemplate the proper role of the state in instilling and enforcing moral precepts. These powerful sanctions are, in turn, constrained by individual rights protected by principles addressed in Constitutional Law, which also exposes students to the institutional structures and relationships that constitute the American system of government. The course teaches students about the scope of congressional powers to legislate in various areas as well as the limitations on those powers. In addition, the course addresses the nature of American federalism and the constitutional relationship between national and state governments. Through these courses, students begin to learn the role of government in society as well as the role of a lawyer in her representation of an individual at odds with the government.

Legal Procedure

The creation and implementation of substantive duties and rights occur not merely in abstract theory but in practical process. Legislation and the Regulatory State, Criminal Law, and, of course, Procedure, in varying degrees, require students to learn how lawyers go about the business of navigating the legal system, whether through administrative process or criminal or civil litigation. The tools of such navigation, as well as knowledge of a lawyer’s ethical responsibility in wielding them, are essential to the education of a lawyer (and are explored more thoroughly in later courses such as Evidence, Criminal Procedure, and Professional Responsibility). These courses introduce students to methods of statutory interpretation, to the constitutional doctrines that govern the roles of Congress and the President in the making of statutes and regulations, and to the statutory frameworks that govern the actions of administrative agencies. In addition, students learn through these courses how the rules as written play out in practice, gaining an introduction to gaps that may exist between the aspirations of law and the ground-truth of law as executed. Students are exposed to the ways in which access to resources or power, the existence of information deficits or asymmetries, or societal biases or structural injustices may influence or inhibit the implementation of legal ideals. Thus, our first-year curriculum runs from the substantive foundation of law as a means to govern the interaction of individuals to the process through which such governance takes place.

The Common Law

Judges have played, and play, an important role in the creation of substantive law, particularly in the areas covered by Contracts, Torts, and Property. Thus, in these courses, students learn the art and skill of reasoning from precedent and of applying underlying principle to new fact patterns. Through this process, students are exposed to the fundamental logic of a lawyer’s trade.

Statute and Regulation

Beyond the common law, substantive rules are created by constitution, statute, and regulation. The Legislation and the Regulatory State and Constitutional Law introduce students to how statute and regulation (including the Constitution) are created and interpreted. Additionally, Contract Law and Criminal Law require students to study at length specific commercial and criminal codes, respectively. Depending on the individual course taught, an exploration of these topics may address a number of significant relationships: between the Constitution and ordinary statute; between statute and regulation; between federal and state government; between legislatures and judges; between judges and juries; and between legal structures and ordinary individuals.

Skills and Experiential Learning

The study of substantive and procedural law is accompanied by serious attention to the skills that students need to navigate, participate in, and affect the practical process of law making, judicial decision making, counseling, negotiation, advocacy and the other aspects of a professional life in the law. Students, through the intensive Lawyering Program and through the immersion method associated with lecture courses, learn to read cases, to analyze statutes, to do research pertaining to judicial decisions, statutes, and regulations, and to formulate positions using the conventions and rhetoric of legal argument.

Required Course Learning Outcomes

Contracts (LAW-LW.11672)

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to demonstrate:

Knowledge and Understanding of Substantive Law (ABA Standard 302(a)(1))

1. Knowledge and understanding of the doctrines governing contract formation, including offer, acceptance, and consideration.
2. Knowledge and understanding of the doctrines governing capacity to contract and the circumstances under which a party's capacity to enter a binding agreement may be limited and doctrines that deal with abuse or over-persuasion by counterparties against individuals with full capacity, fraud, misrepresentation, and unconscionability.
3. Knowledge and understanding of the principles governing contract interpretation, including the resolution of ambiguity and the role of extrinsic evidence.
4. Knowledge and understanding of the doctrines governing conditions and the excuse of performance, including impossibility, impracticability, and frustration of purpose.
5. Knowledge and understanding of the remedies available for breach of contract, including expectation, reliance, and restitution damages, and the availability of equitable remedies, and doctrines that limit remedies such as liquidated damages, penalties, and public policy.
6. Knowledge and understanding of the relevant provisions of the Uniform Commercial Code and other statutes governing private agreements, and their relationship to common law and equitable principles.

Legal Analysis and Reasoning (ABA Standard 302(a)(2), (3))

1. The ability to analyze and apply contract doctrine to novel fact patterns arising at each stage of a contractual relationship, from formation through performance, breach, and remedy.
2. The ability to identify and evaluate the policy considerations underlying contract doctrine, including the balance struck among freedom of contract, efficiency, fairness, and predictability in commercial and private dealings.
3. The ability to determine which body of law — common law or statutory— governs a given transaction or dispute, and to apply the appropriate doctrinal framework accordingly.
4. The ability to construct and evaluate reasoned legal arguments concerning contested questions of contract formation, interpretation, performance, and remedy.
5. The ability to apply contract doctrine to explain and evaluate the legal effects of agreements and to identify alternatives.

Criminal Law (LAW-LW.11147)

Students in this course will:

• Learn how to closely read statutory texts and specifically how to analyze the elements of a criminal statute.
• Further hone their skills at common law reasoning and the distinguishing of cases.
• Familiarize themselves with the rules and principles that govern society's efforts to apportion blame and responsibility as part of its criminal laws.
• Understand the relationship between criminal punishment and the concepts of fault, wrongdoing, proportionality, and accountability.
• Master the analytical elements to assign blame and assess justifications and excuses.
• Gain insight into the potential and limits of legal processes in general, and the criminal law in particular, to serve as an instrument of social control.

Lawyering (LAW-LW.10687)

Lawyering serves as an introduction to the theory and practice of the practice of law. NYU School of Law is the only top-tier law school committed to giving first-year law students this manner of sophisticated, in-depth grounding in the interactive, fact-sensitive, and interpretive work that is fundamental to excellence in the law.

In 1986 NYU Law expanded its first-year curriculum to include a Lawyering Program that was unique in American law school education, encouraging students to see that law develops interactively, as it is used. Five years later, in 1991, a multidisciplinary group led by Anthony Amsterdam, cultural psychologist Jerome Bruner, and Peggy Cooper Davis began a program of research and colloquia at NYU School of Law designed to deepen understanding about the disciplines and pedagogies appropriate to the study of law. As a result, Lawyering’s goal is for students to develop foundational legal skills and a parallel process of thoughtful inquiry. Highlighted in the Carnegie Report on Legal Education, the Lawyering Program uses a series of increasingly complex simulated exercises to encourage approaching legal problems by understanding a question, planning, executing, and critically reflecting on the consequences of choices. Each simulation is an opportunity to experiment as a lawyer, in order to enhance performance and professionalism. Because each practice simulation is followed by self-evaluation and critical feedback, Lawyering students become skilled practitioners who constantly reconsider and refine their approaches to legal problems.

In order to successfully develop this depth of professionalism in our students, members of the Lawyering Faculty are selected, in part, based on a demonstrated experience and understanding of excellence in legal practice.

Fall Semester

The fall semester introduces students to legal interpretation, written advocacy and analysis, fact development, and client counseling. The semester begins with an introduction to reading, briefing, and analyzing a case. This is quickly followed by synthesizing a closed universe of cases and drafting the argument section of a related brief. The course next turns to the development of facts through the experience of interviewing a witness and drafting an affidavit. The fall semester concludes by bringing these skills together in an open universe research client counseling simulation: interviewing a client, researching and drafting a subsequent research memo, and counseling the client based on the memo.

Spring Semester

While the fall semester focuses on understanding a legal problem, the spring semester requires students to advocate based on that understanding. The spring begins with a transactional negotiation: interviewing a client, negotiating a satisfactory deal, drafting the resulting contract when applicable, and presenting the results to the client. The final, and most extensive, phase of the spring semester requires a memorandum of law, supporting declaration, and oral argument on the motion before a lawyer or judge, often in an off-campus setting such as a courtroom, judge’s chambers, or law office. This exercise represents the culmination of the lawyering skills and theories introduced and developed throughout the year.

Legislation and the Regulatory State (LAW-LW.10925)

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to demonstrate:

Knowledge and Understanding of Substantive Law (ABA Standard 302(a)(1))

1. Knowledge and understanding of the legislative lawmaking process, including how Congress enacts statutes and the institutional and procedural context in which legislation is produced.
2. Knowledge and understanding of the doctrines and tools courts and lawyers use to interpret statutes, including the major theories and canons of statutory interpretation.
3. Knowledge and understanding of the structure and powers of administrative agencies, including their role in implementing statutes through rulemaking and other administrative procedures.
4. Knowledge and understanding of the doctrines of administrative law that empower and constrain agencies in interpreting and implementing statutes.
5. Knowledge and understanding of the role of courts in reviewing agency action at the behest of affected private parties, including the standards governing judicial review.
6. Knowledge and understanding of the constitutional rules and separation-of-powers principles governing the relationships among Congress, the President, administrative agencies, and the courts.

Legal Analysis and Reasoning (ABA Standard 302(a)(2), (3))

1. The ability to apply interpretive tools and doctrines to construe the meaning of statutes in the context of specific legal problems.
2. The ability to analyze and critically assess the processes, purposes, efficacy, and limitations of governance through an administrative regulatory regime, as distinct from criminal enforcement or private law.
3. The ability to critically evaluate the rules and institutional norms governing the relationships among Congress, the President, agencies, and the courts, including the allocation of lawmaking and interpretive authority among them.
4. The ability to identify and analyze the legal and policy issues that arise when statutory and regulatory schemes are implemented, interpreted, and enforced by multiple institutional actors.

Other Professional Skills (ABA Standard 302(a)(4), (b))

1. The ability to work effectively with the materials, concepts, and tools that lawyers require to practice in a legal environment dominated by statutes and regulations, providing a foundation for further study in constitutional law, administrative law, and specialized fields of regulation.
2. The ability to communicate legal analysis effectively in written and oral form when addressing questions of statutory interpretation and administrative governance.

Procedure (LAW-LW.11650)

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to demonstrate:

Knowledge and Understanding of Substantive Law (ABA Standard 302(a)(1))

1. Knowledge and understanding of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and their application to the phases of a civil lawsuit, including pleadings, discovery, and pre-trial adjudication.
2. Knowledge and understanding of the doctrines governing personal jurisdiction over parties and subject matter jurisdiction of federal and state courts.
3. Introduction to the doctrines governing the preclusive effects of prior adjudication, including claim and issue preclusion.
4. Knowledge and understanding of the constitutional issues relating to jurisdiction and procedural protections, including due process limits on the exercise of judicial power.
5. Knowledge and understanding of the relationship and division of authority between state and federal courts in civil litigation.

Legal Analysis and Reasoning (ABA Standard 302(a)(2), (3))

1. The ability to analyze and apply procedural doctrine to novel fact patterns arising at each phase of civil litigation, from the determination of jurisdiction through final judgment.
2. The ability to critically evaluate the elements of a fair procedural system and to assess how procedural rules and doctrines advance or undermine that fairness.
3. The ability to critically evaluate the tradeoffs between efficient and costly procedure, and between rules and standards, in the design and application of procedural law.
4. The ability to analyze how procedural rules mediate the exercise of power, including their effect on equal access to civil courts and remedies.
5. The ability to integrate theoretical understanding of the functions of the procedural system with practical insight into litigation strategy.

Other Professional Skills (ABA Standard 302(a)(4), (b))

1. The ability to communicate procedural analysis effectively in written and oral form when addressing contested questions of civil procedure arising in litigation.

Multiple-Section Course Learning Outcomes

Constitutional Law for 1Ls (LAW-LW.10598)

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to demonstrate:

Knowledge and Understanding of Substantive Law (ABA Standard 302(a)(1))

1. Knowledge and understanding of the scope and limits of judicial review, including the judiciary's power to resolve constitutional questions.
2. Knowledge and understanding of separation-of-powers doctrine governing the relationships among the branches of the federal government.
3. Knowledge and understanding of federalism doctrine and the allocation of authority between the federal and state governments, including the scope of federal regulatory power.
4. Knowledge and understanding of the constitutional doctrines of individual liberty and equality, including privileges or immunities, substantive due process, and equal protection.

Legal Analysis and Reasoning (ABA Standard 302(a)(2), (3))

1. The ability to identify, apply, and critically evaluate the available methods of constitutional interpretation, and to assess their relative persuasiveness in resolving contested constitutional questions.
2. The ability to analyze and apply constitutional doctrine, both structural and rights-based, to novel or hypothetical fact patterns.
3. The ability to situate constitutional doctrine and theory within relevant historical, social, and political context, and to critically assess how that context shapes constitutional development.
4. The ability to analyze the interconnections among structural constitutional doctrines (judicial review, separation of powers, federalism) and rights-based doctrines (liberty and equality), and to apply them in combination to complex constitutional problems.

Other Professional Skills (ABA Standard 302(a)(4), (b))

1. The ability to construct and communicate, in written and oral form, a reasoned constitutional argument that draws on relevant precedent, interpretive methodology, and contextual understanding.

Corporations for 1Ls (LAW-LW.10223)

1. Substantive Knowledge & Doctrine

• Understand the legal steps for forming, operating, and merging a business corporation, including the role of articles of incorporation and bylaws.
• Analyze the fiduciary duties of care and loyalty owed by directors, officers, and controlling shareholders to the corporation and its shareholders.
• Understand the voting rights of shareholders, the regulation of voting through the federal proxy rules

2. Legal Analysis, Reasoning, and Skills

• Analyze leading corporate law cases (e.g., Delaware Chancery decisions) and apply them to novel business scenarios.
• Interpret and apply state corporate statutes (e.g. the Delaware General Corporation Law) and selected provisions of federal law that impact corporate governance.
• Identify legal issues in corporate transactions, such as mergers and acquisitions, tender offers, and the use of anti-takeover devices.
• Demonstrate a rudimentary understanding of corporate finance, including capital structure, dividends, and distributions.

3. Conceptual Understanding

• Analyze how power over the corporation is and can be divided between corporate director, manager, and shareholders and assess its implications.
• Understand the concept of agency costs, how different methods such as fiduciary duty law, voting, board monitoring, compensation structure or takeovers relate to agency costs, and the limitations of these methods.
• Understand collective action problems in voting.

Criminal Procedure: Police Practices (LAW.LW.12697)

At the conclusion of this course, you should be able to:

1. understand and critically evaluate various dimensions of Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Due Process, and Sixth Amendment jurisprudence;
2. apply those bodies of doctrine to a set of facts from both a prosecutor’s and defense attorney’s standpoint in an organized and persuasive way;
3. articulate well-reasoned predictions as to how the Supreme Court would resolve legal disputes that implicate the preceding doctrines; and
4. identify and understand how race and other demographic characteristics intersect with and are shaped by constitutional criminal procedure.

Property (for 1Ls) (LAW-LW.10427)

1. Demonstrate Knowledge of Property Law Fundamentals — Explain and apply foundational principles of property law, including the purposes served by different property regimes, methods of acquisition, estates in land, co-ownership, servitudes, the public trust doctrine, and public land-use regulation such as zoning and eminent domain.
2. Analyze Property and Land Use Problems — Identify and analyze legal issues arising from disputes over acquisition, ownership, use, and transfer of property, applying statutes and case law to complex fact patterns involving both land and other resources.
3. Interpret Regulatory and Private Governance Frameworks — Read and interpret deed restrictions, covenants, planned-community governing documents, and public land-use regulations, and evaluate how these interact with common law property principles.
4. Evaluate Constitutional and Regulatory Constraints — Assess constitutional limits on government regulation of property, including takings and eminent domain doctrine, and apply these doctrines to regulatory disputes.
5. Communicate Legal Analysis — Communicate legal analysis of property and land-use issues clearly and persuasively, in writing and in class discussion.
6. Apply Theoretical and Policy Perspectives — Evaluate the theoretical justifications for property institutions, examine how private arrangements and community-planning devices shape resource allocation and development, and assess competing policy considerations across a range of resource types and use contexts.
7. Exercise Professional Judgment — Recognize professional responsibilities in property practice, including counseling clients on interests in land and wealth and navigating landlord-tenant and community-planning relationships.
8. Build a Foundation for Related Fields — Recognize how property doctrine and analysis underlie related areas of private and public law, including environmental law, intellectual property, trusts and estates, corporate law, real estate contracts, commercial transactions, bankruptcy, administrative law, and constitutional law.