Civil Procedure
This is a course about the processes that courts follow in deciding disputes in noncriminal cases. It deals with the way in which conflicts are framed for courts, the stages through which litigation pass, the division of power among the various decision-makers in the legal system and between the state and federal courts, the territorial limitations on the exercise of judicial power, the principles that define the consequences of a decision once a court has finished with a case, and the special opportunities and problems of litigation involving multiple disputants. Throughout the course, considerable attention will be devoted to the goals, values, costs, and tensions underlying our adversarial system of adjudication.
Legal Profession: Understanding the Plaintiff’s Attorney
This course will examine the rules of professional conduct and the values and responsibilities of the legal profession and its members through the lens of the plaintiff’s attorney. A significant set of the norms governing the legal profession apply primarily to plaintiff’s attorneys – rules about advertising, solicitation, investing money in another’s lawsuit (champerty) and contingent fees, for example – while general rules about conflicts of interest and confidentiality have special application when a lawyer represents a plaintiff, or multiple plaintiffs, a class of plaintiffs in a class action, or even a group of cases in a multidistrict litigation (MDLs). These issues are of special interest to students considering a career as a plaintiff’s lawyer (at a firm or public interest group). But they also are important for students more likely to work at defense-oriented firms, as comprehending the incentives of plaintiff’s lawyers, and how the rules of professional conduct structure their behavior, are important components in providing adequate representation to a corporation or other defendant. The course will examine the rules governing a plaintiff’s practice sequentially, from the hunt for clients through judgment or settlement, and then will encompass case studies of a variety of plaintiff’s firms, including local tort firms, national and mass tort firms, class action firms, and litigation funders.
