Conflict of Laws Course Policies

The American Bar Association standards for accrediting law schools require not less than one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and two hours of out-of-class student work per week for each credit awarded for a class. According to the standards, fifty minutes suffices for one hour of classroom time, while an hour for out-of-class time is sixty minutes.

This is a three-credit class. We will spend 75 minutes together in class two time per week, which translates to 150 minutes of class time per week, which precisely the amount required.

The ABA minimum of out-of-class time for a three-credit course is six hours per week. This would be met if you devoted three hours preparing for each class — although you really should do more than that.

The ABA requires course syllabi to contain learning outcomes. The learning outcomes that I desire for this course are:

1) Mastery of the main choice-of-law approaches used by state and federal courts in the United States, as well as their theoretical underpinnings andcriticism of those underpinnings.

2) Mastery of the basics of federal constitutional limitations on choice of law.

3) Mastery of the basics of the constitutional and non-constitutional limits on the recognition of foreign judgments.

Students will be expected to have done the reading each day and to have thought about the study questions. Everyone is vulnerable to being called upon at random. If I am emailed by midnight the night before, however, you can "take a pass" and insure that you won't be called on that day. You can take a pass only two times the semester. During the final two weeks of class you cannot take more than one pass.

The class may not be taped without my permission.

The exam will be limited open book. Commercial outlines, hornbooks, treatises etc. will not be  permitted in the examination. You will not be permitted to access the internet for this examination. You will be able to bring into the examination only the following materials:
a)    All materials assigned in this course, that is:
    i)     Currie, Kay, Kramer, & Roosevelt, Conflict of Laws (9th, 8th or 7th ed.)
    ii)     Reading materials that were available on the website for the course.
b)     Any outline made by you or by a study group within which you participated.
c)     Your class notes.

I will take class participation into account in the final grade. I may raise some students' grades by a third (e.g. B+ to A-) if they are particularly active and informed class participants.