1L January Experiential Term Curriculum

Winter 2027 Offerings

• Advocacy: The Courtroom and Beyond

  Taught by practicing attorneys, this course allows students to develop their oral, written, and strategic advocacy skills. Through interactive exercises, case studies, and team-based work, the course introduces students to ways to advance a client’s interest in a variety of different contexts, including in impact litigation, in the private sector, in the criminal law context, and in the public eye.

  Working with their teams, students will:

  • Learn advocacy strategies
  • Analyze amicus briefs and other written advocacy
  • Practice negotiating
  • Develop oral presentations
  • Draft a letter to the editor and an op-ed in support of their advocacy efforts

  Assignments for the course include both individual and team-based work. Students should be available to meet with their teams in the afternoon to complete team-based assignments. In lieu of a final exam, student teams will research, draft, and present an advocacy plan on a topic of their choice.

  Note: There may be days throughout the winter term that require attendance beyond the scheduled times. Please refer to the course syllabus and page for more information.

  Faculty: Ara Gershengorn, and Erin Walczewski

• Lawyering for Justice in the United States

  Many students come to Harvard Law School to learn to correct injustices they have experienced or observed. Lawyering promises to be a concrete method of social justice problem solving, a set of tools that the lawyer can use to make a positive difference. But what does it really look like to “lawyer for justice”? The strategies and tactics of public interest lawyers vary widely depending on their clients, their causes, their geography, and their own interests, talents, and expertise. How do you choose how to lawyer? What tools in the lawyer’s toolkit are best suited to your task? And what are the limits on the lawyer’s role? How do lawyers situate themselves in the ecosystem of change agents, offering their unique skills (and credentials) while making space to learn and benefit from other voices and methodologies?

  This course will help first-year students explore these foundational questions through interactive sessions led by experienced practitioners teaching and lawyering in the HLS clinical programs and their community partners. Each day, a clinical teacher working on a different social justice problem – immigration, predatory lending, human rights, criminal justice, education, housing, building a solidarity economy, and more – will share their thoughts on what it means to lawyer for justice and will lead students through discussions and exercises that offer first-hand experience of a wide range of lawyering dilemmas and approaches. Collectively, the sessions will cover a diverse set of lawyering techniques, including impact litigation, legislative and policy advocacy, transactional work, community lawyering, media advocacy, system mapping, and the representation of individuals in proceedings in unjust systems. The course will end in a full-day “hackathon” in which students will apply human-centered design principles to the development of strategies and tactics to address one or more contemporary justice problems.

  Note: There may be days throughout the winter term that require attendance beyond the scheduled times. Please refer to the course syllabus and page for more information.

  Faculty: Esme Caramello, Tyler Giannini, Michael Gregory, and Dehlia Umunna

• Leadership Fundamentals

  Background: Harvard Law School graduates have a long history of leadership, drawing on the critical thinking, advocacy, and legal knowledge they learn at law school. This course introduces students to the fundamentals of effective leadership and helps them to explore and practice a variety of leadership approaches and skillsets. The course is highly interactive and team-based, allowing students to learn from each other and build stronger relationships among their peers. We learn about leadership through case studies, discussions and exercises, and also from guest speakers who are leading change in the legal profession, both in the public and the private sector.  We also focus considerably on effective career strategies for lawyers and how to best position yourself and deal with the challenges of leadership as you progress in your career.  We focus on the challenges that the practice of law presents to those who seek to exercise leadership, as well.

  Teaching goals of the course/who should consider this course: This course is designed for students who are interested in building a deeper understanding of leadership frameworks, practices, and tools to accelerate their ability to create impact as leaders.  Because the course is team based, it is important that you are able to commit to meeting with your team most afternoons during J-term to complete team-based assignments together as a team.

  Course content: We explore a variety of fundamental leadership frameworks and tools, including:

  • Personal leadership:
    • Understanding your own working style and preferences and how to work more effectively across lines of difference
    • Understanding motivational and influence psychology in order to gain buy-in as a leader
    • Developing effective listening skills, human-centered design interviewing, negotiating conflict, and giving and receiving feedback
  • Team leadership:
    • Working in teams and leveraging important research about what makes for effective teamwork, such as how to improve team performance and communication, and how to create inclusive team environments
    • Understanding and building team resilience to help teams adapt to uncertainty, failure and rapidly changing circumstances
  • Leadership practices and frameworks:
    • Applying the leadership practice of public narrative and storytelling to drive change and grow personally and professionally
    • Applying design thinking principles to lead positive, human-centric change
    • Applying principles of adaptive leadership to thrive in uncertain times and drive change from any level, seeing leadership as an activity rather than a role or a title
  • Developing yourself as a leader:
    • Building and leveraging professional and personal networks
    • Managing the increasingly complex levels of responsibility you encounter as you advance your career
    • Understanding career management strategies that help you grow and learn more effectively
    • Maintaining your own mental and spiritual well-being

  Course structure and expectations: Through a mixture of leadership case studies with guest speakers, interactive exercises, and working in teams, students will explore the real-world skills and mindsets that leaders call upon to catalyze change across the legal profession. Instructors and teaching assistants will provide regular feedback to teams with respect to written and oral presentations. Especially because this is a team-based course, students are expected to attend each class in order to work in their teams and contribute to team assignments. Students will complete light homework assignments each afternoon, most with their assigned team.

  Note: There may be days throughout the winter term that require attendance beyond the scheduled times. Please refer to the course syllabus and page for more information.

  Faculty:  Scott Westfahl

• Negotiation Workshop

  Most lawyers, irrespective of their specialty, must negotiate. Litigators resolve far more disputes through negotiation than by trials. Business lawyers – whether putting together a start-up company, arranging venture financing, or preparing an initial public offering – are called upon to negotiate on behalf of their clients. Public interest lawyers, in-house counsel, government attorneys, criminal lawyers, tort lawyers, and commercial litigators all share the need to be effective negotiators.

  This Workshop, by combining theory and practice, aims to improve both the participants understanding of negotiation and their effectiveness as negotiators. Drawing on work from a variety of research perspectives, the readings and lectures will provide students with a framework for analyzing negotiations and tools and concepts useful in negotiating more effectively. Participants will spend much of their time in a series of negotiation exercises and simulations, whereas negotiators and critical observers, they will become more aware of their own behavior as negotiators and learn to analyze what works, what does not work, and why.

  Participants should have no other work commitments during the winter term. Class attendance is essential and required at all sessions including the first and last days of the workshop.

  On most days the workshop runs from 9am to 1pm. There may be several days throughout the winter term that require attendance beyond the scheduled times, with significant advance notice given to allow students to plan accordingly. You should expect that you will spend additional hours beyond scheduled class time reflecting on lessons learned from their negotiations and preparing to negotiate the next day. Students also will be expected to write a final reflection piece synthesizing their learning from the term.

  Note: There may be days throughout the winter term that require attendance beyond the scheduled times. Please refer to the course syllabus and page for more information.

  Faculty: Sheila Heen, and Shane Hebel.

• Technology and the Public Interest

  In the course Technology and the Public Interest (2027), we ask a deceptively simple question with dramatic stakes: should societies regulate AI, social media, and other new digital technologies — and if so, how? During the January term, this course will bring students into direct conversation with the people shaping this debate who join the course as guests, including a mix of regulators, technology executives, journalists, litigators, and scholars who have spent careers wrestling with these problems from different vantage points. Students will examine concrete controversies — from state attorneys general suing Meta over child safety, to the fight over Section 230, to the EU’s AI Act and its global ripple effects — not as abstract case studies but as live disputes with unsettled outcomes. Alongside these policy questions, the course also turns inward, asking how AI is already changing the practice of law itself and what it means to prepare for a legal career in which these tools are a given rather than a novelty.

  Students should expect an experiential course that adopts a discussion-driven, guest-intensive format rather than a traditional 1L law school course. The course culminates in group presentations that require students to take a position on one of the term’s central debates. This course is designed to meet the Negotiation/Leadership Course Requirement. We do so by focusing in particular on experiential learning with individualized feedback, especially on the topics of decision-making, cognitive biases, judgment; active listening; and team creation and functioning. No prior technical background is assumed; what the course does assume is curiosity about how law, technology, and public policy are being renegotiated in real time, and a willingness to wrestle with these themes both to understand them on their merits and their applicability to the practice of law itself.

  Note: There may be days throughout the winter term that require attendance beyond the scheduled times. Please refer to the course syllabus and page for more information.

  Faculty: John Palfrey

• The Craft of Lawyering

  In this course, we will use a series of case studies to explore the role of litigators and the craft of lawyering. The problems will involve issues of privacy, cybersecurity, federal statutory and constitutional law and intellectual property and will arise in both the civil and criminal context. We will engage in a series of exercises to explore the analytical, writing, presentation and negotiation skills necessary to effectively perform the multiple roles of lawyers. While the case studies are primarily litigation-focused, the information discussed and skills taught will be applicable in many different contexts.

  Note: There may be days throughout the winter term that require attendance beyond the scheduled times. Please refer to the course syllabus and page for more information.

  Faculty: Felicia Ellsworth, and Sarah Frazier