Required Clinic Component: Employment Law Clinic (3-5 fall clinical credits). This clinic and course are bundled; enrollment in the clinic will automatically enroll you in this course.

Additional Co-/Pre-Requisites: None.

By Permission: No.

Add/Drop Deadline: August 12, 2022.

LLM Students: International students on F-1 student visas are required to have Curricular Practical Training (CPT) authorization; LL.M. students are not eligible for CPT.

This course will develop lawyering skills in the context of employment law. After a brief overview of relevant doctrine and procedure, the course will address – through readings, lectures, and exercises – skills related to legal writing, oral advocacy, discovery, depositions, negotiations, counseling, and ethics. The course will follow the progress of a typical civil rights lawsuit involving a terminated employee. For example, one class session will require students to engage in a mock deposition of an opposing witness in a hypothetical sex discrimination case, and the next class will require students to engage in a negotiation in the same case.

A more general goal of the course is to develop the ability (1) to identify what skills make a lawyer effective, and (2) to implement strategies for independently identifying and improving those critical skills. Because this goal is advanced by exposure to actual lawyering, all students will have a clinical placement with the Employment Law Clinic. The workshop will require completion of an individual or group project that will connect clinical placements with course topics.