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Fall 2023

5314 Lawyering Skills and Strategies - C1 - HEARD- 12807

Professor(s): Whitney Heard (CLINICAL FACULTY [405(b)])

Credits: 3

Course Areas: 1st Year - Section C 

Time: 2:30p-4:00p  TTH  Location: 311 

Course Outline: In Lawyering Skills and Strategies I you will develop the following essential lawyering skills: Identifying and analyzing legal issues; conducting legal research; and writing real world legal documents. In contrast to other 1L classes, in LSS you will not learn law in the abstract. Rather, you will learn how to use the substantive law you are learning in your other classes in practice. This results in several immediate benefits to you. You will learn skills that make you a better law student. You will prepare writing samples necessary for judicial internship and law firm summer clerkship applications. And you will learn and hone the research, writing, and oral communications skills employers demand. Some writing and revising will be completed in class. I will assign limited outside reading so that you can complete other writing and revising outside of class. I will be mindful of your time.

Course Syllabus: Syllabus

Course Notes: (Face-to-Face)  The UH registration system instruction mode for this course is listed in parenthesis. After student registration opens, there may be instruction mode changes to this course up through two weeks before the first day of classes for the term, but notice of such changes will be sent to then-registered students. For this instruction mode, instructors and students are expected to normally be physically present in the classroom. If the course has a final examination, it will be in a classroom requiring your physical presence. Other assessment, such as a mid term exam, may also be in a classroom. Whether this instructor will offer “remote presence” (starting a zoom meeting from the podium computer to enable student remote access on an occasional basis) for part or all of the semester is not known, but students should not rely on an expectation that remote presence will be available.

Prerequisites:  

First Day Assignments:

Final Exam Schedule:    

This course will have:
Exam:
Paper:


Satisfies Senior Upper Level Writing Requirement: No

Experiential Course Type: No

Bar Course: No

DistanceEd ABA: No

Pass-Fail Student Election: Unavailable (Required Course)

Course Materials

Book(s) Required

Course Materials: A Lawyer Writes: A Practical Guide to Legal Analysis(3d ed. 2018) by Christine Coughlin, Joan Malmud Rocklin & Sandy Patrick (“A Lawyer Writes”). The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (21st ed. 2020), published by the Harvard Law Review Association (“Bluebook”).

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (21st ed. 2020), published by the Harvard Law Review Association (“Bluebook”). Please purchase the print book. The Bluebook Uncovered: A Practical Guide to Mastering Legal Citation (21st ed. of The Bluebook), by Dionne E. Anthon (“Bluebook Uncovered”). This free e-book is available online.