The Lawyering Practicum is designed to simulate a student's first year in legal practice at criminal defense, civil litigation, or entertainment firms. Students are divided into three sections, working directly with experienced partners in small groups to develop essential skills needed for effective legal practice. As part of the course, students complete assignments typically encountered in their first year as associates, including conducting legal research, drafting memoranda, and drafting persuasive briefs.

This course offers a comprehensive exploration of public interest law. Students will delve into a wide range of public interest law issues, including immigrant rights, civil rights, environmental justice, worker’s rights, and criminal justice reform. By examining diverse models of legal advocacy, such as impact litigation, direct legal service, policy advocacy, community organizing, holistic defense, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of the various strategies employed to advance social justice.

An advanced business organizations course on legal and economic issues involved in corporate financing decisions, covering valuation of corporate entities and their securities; corporate capital structures, including the relationship of corporate debt to equity and the impact of leverage, dividend, and investment policy; use and risk relating to derivative securities and asset-backed securities; and mergers and acquisitions, including consideration of fairness to and protection for minority shareholders.

This course offers a comprehensive exploration of public interest law through a global perspective. The course explores both global perspectives of public interest legal advocacy strategies across diverse substantive areas of public interest law.

This course explores the evolving regulatory landscape as it relates to disinformation (the deliberate distribution of falsity), misinformation (unintended distribution of falsity), and malinformation (the leak of truthful information intended to cause harm). The focus of this course will be international and comparative. This course surveys the laws and norms associated with efforts to address disinformation and fake news on the world stage, and to mitigate their negative impacts.

For over a century, the United States has wrestled with how to treat youth in the juvenile justice system, and many have questioned its effectiveness. This struggle centers on the tension between recognizing youth as developmentally distinct from adults, thus deserving of second chances and rehabilitative services, and historically and culturally driven notions of accountability, justice, and safety.

Spanish for Lawyers reinforces and enhances students existing Spanish communication skills for legal practice. Class instruction, course readings, and assignments are primarily in Spanish. Students are expected to have a working level of Spanish language fluency (written and oral) to enroll in the course. Native-like or "advanced placement" levels of fluency are not required; however, a student should feel prepared to speak, read, and write in Spanish throughout the course.

Introduces fundamental principles of the laws governing battlefield conduct of hostilities (the Hague tradition) and treatment of those caught in war's crosshairs (the Geneva tradition). A blended approach requires applying assigned reading to contemporary conflicts.

This course will blend lectures with simulation assignments and class discussions. This course will explore the emerging field of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and its impact on legal practice and selected areas of substantive law. The course will first introduce students to the fundamental technology, commonly used large language models, and related GenAI tools available to lawyers. The course will then survey a broad array of legal practice, substantive law, and policy topics to illustrate the risks and benefits of GenAI.

This course will build upon and expand essential legal research techniques and strategies introduced in the first-year LAWS course but will focus entirely on California. New topics include California legislative history, California administrative law resources, and the full range of secondary sources, including California-specific practice guides and databases. California state law will be the focus of the class, but some California federal laws will be discussed to highlight research challenges.