Why do we have patents? What behavior do they reward? Are they an efficient incentive? Patent Theory and Economics will explore these questions and related issues to solidify students’ understanding of the patent system and doctrine, as well as to provide students with the facility to assess clients’ needs and opportunities for reform. The course will focus on readings of economic and legal scholarship, and will be conducted in a student-driven, seminar format. Responsibilities for leading discussions will be assigned after the first day of class. The course will principally use electronic materials distributed through Canvas, including additional handouts and topical materials as they may arise during the semester. The course may include possible guest lectures from visiting faculty. The course may be taken for Upper Level Writing Credit.
Sequence and Prerequisites: While previously completing a Patent Law or Intellectual Property course is suggested, it is not required.
Evaluation: Paper
This course delves into the legal foundations of corporate fraud investigations, focusing on practical approaches to defending companies and their officers/directors. The statutes covered tentatively include: securities fraud, mail/wire fraud, insider trading, money laundering, false statements, conspiracy, criminal forfeiture, and other potential criminal and regulatory violations.
Tentative topics include:
- Real-life Investigations: Understanding the conduct of grand jury and administrative investigations.
- Corporate Privilege: Applying privilege within the corporate environment.
- Parallel Proceedings: Managing simultaneous civil and criminal proceedings.
- Company Issues: Addressing differences between private and public companies, with an emphasis on the expanding role of private equity.
- Officer/Director Representation: Navigating issues related to D&O insurance, separation agreements, and whistleblower concerns.
- Data Privacy: Handling data privacy issues effectively.
- Managing Third Parties: Overseeing consultants, e-discovery vendors, and forensic support.
- Government Perspective: Understanding regulatory expectations and enforcement priorities.
This comprehensive course provides a practical perspective on the complexities of corporate fraud and the legal strategies involved in defending against such allegations.
Sequence and Prerequisites: Business Associations is recommended, although not required.
Evaluation: The course will be graded based on attendance and engaged participation, one to two short presentations, and a short paper on emerging areas related to corporate fraud investigation, prosecution, and defense.
This course is designed for students who may desire to pursue a career as a transactional or business attorney or who otherwise may want to gain a further understanding of the deal process. This course will (i) establish a universal, straight-forward process for analyzing any transaction or deal, (ii) provide easy to apply negotiation techniques to maximize a client’s rights while minimizing a client’s obligations in any transaction or deal, (iii) explore key transactional law concepts and contract provisions that often arise in business deals (e.g., indemnification, limitations on liability, etc.), and (iv) discuss common issues that are faced by transactional and business lawyers as they begin their legal careers. Each of these topics will be explored and examined through a series of interactive exercises and classroom discussions. The course will cover a wide range of transactions and deals including mergers and acquisitions, debt and equity financings, partnership and shareholder arrangements, venture capital investments, intellectual property licenses and joint ventures, real estate purchases and leases, employment and compensation packages, and other common commercial contracts and arrangements
Sequence and Prerequisite:None
Evaluation Method: Spring 2026: Take home exam/project; Fall 2026 and thereafter: final exam
This highly interactive and unique course will introduce students to the tools and techniques used by law firms and law departments in support of legal practice and business operations. Designed to prepare students for the new realities of practice in 2026 and beyond, including the quickly expanding use and impact of artificial intelligence (AI), the curriculum provides an overview of major categories of technology use and practice innovation—information that young lawyers can use to make an immediate impact in employment and career. Students will learn about new forms of legal business operation and the changing structure and expert makeup of legal teams. Knowledge gained can be used as a skill set differentiator when interviewing and entering legal practice. The course will be taught by working lawyers/consultants; each weekly session will include live technology demonstrations and guest appearances from preeminent law firm and law department lawyers, legal operations professionals and industry experts.
Sequence and Prerequisites: None
Evaluation: The course is pass/fail based on class participation and preparation during the semester, as well as a short, written paper to be submitted at the end of the course.
We are not living within our environmental means. We are depleting groundwater supplies, degrading agricultural soils, overfishing the oceans, cutting forests faster than they can re-grow, and filling in coastal and wetland areas in ways that exacerbate the devastating effects of floods and hurricanes. Our continued dependence on fossil fuels has caused an accumulation of greenhouse gases that threatens catastrophic changes in the Earth’s climate patterns. And our conversion of forests, grasslands, and wetlands to agriculture and urban development has resulted in a precipitous decline in biodiversity.
In this seminar we will pursue two distinct goals: first, to develop a better appreciation of the problems that beset our planet and the practices in which we each engage on a daily basis that cause those problems; and second, to ask deeper, more theoretical questions about why we continue, as individuals and as a society, to engage in those practices when evidence suggests that their short-term gains will not be worth their long-term costs. These two goals will cause us to pan back and forth between the empirics of environmental degradation and the theoretical and legal presuppositions that support and encourage our unsustainable practices.
This seminar is explicitly designed to complement the study of environmental law. Without understanding, for example, the value of biodiversity, the importance of preserving wilderness, the impact on animals of industrialized meat production, and the ways in which our consumptive practices continue to destabilize the climate, we will fail to craft and apply environmental law so as to serve its highest and best purposes. Only by understanding the sources of environmental degradation and by engaging in debate about the ethics of environmental management, can students (and ultimately law and policy makers) understand the role that law can best play in inducing sustainable practices and protecting valuable natural capital.
Sequence and Prerequisites: None
Evaluation: Students will be asked to do several in-class activities (cumulatively worth one-third of their grade) and two short papers (each worth one-third of their grade).
The course will be conducted in a multi-media approach utilizing news clips, videos, podcasts, cases and articles. Students will examine how the Supreme Court has adjudicated the definition and development of the concept of women’s citizenship. Additionally, the Dobbs decision will be analyzed as a starting point to understand the Court’s revision of the definition of privacy as it has been enshrined as precedent in Roe for almost fifty years. The course will delve into the history of Supreme Court cases that have examined women’s rights addressing issues such as education, health, employment, intersectionality, race, religion, sexual orientation and culture. Throughout the course women lawyers who have been and are involved with the Supreme Court as clerks, nominees and candidates will be highlighted.
Sequence and Prerequisites: Constitutional Law is a prerequisite.
Evaluation: Two writing assignments. Students will select from several topics in consultation with the professor.
This is a seminar offered jointly by the University of Illinois and the University of Pennsylvania. It is co-taught by Leo Katz (Penn) and Michael Moore (Illinois). Students from both of these universities will be enrolled in the seminar. It is also possible that students/post-docs/faculty from other schools will also be auditing the seminar in whole or in part, as has been true of similar seminars in the past.
The subject matter of the seminar will be contemporary theories of two related areas of law, contracts and property. The seminar will together read and discuss a number of articles/book chapters/book excerpts by leading property or contract theorists in America, the UK, Germany, and elsewhere. Because the authors of these readings will often be invited in from remote locations to join the seminar discussion, and because this is a joint seminar involving students from different universities, each of the sessions will be conducted on Zoom. While there may be occasional in person sessions at either Penn or Illinois, there will otherwise be no in person classroom component.
Each student at the University of Illinois will be expected to team up (by Zoom) with at least one student from Penn to prepare questions and comments for the authors on one of the papers to be read and discussed in one of the fourteen sessions of the seminar. In addition, Illinois students will be expected to prepare a 5-10 page paper exploring in greater depth one of the topics discussed during the semester. This can be the topic on which the student also prepared questions for in-class discussion. There will no exam or other formal requirements other than regular attendance and participation.
Because there is no overlap between the content of this seminar and the content of the Seminar on Advanced Topics in Criminal Law taught by Michael Moore and Leo Katz academic year 2023-24, students who have taken the latter seminar may also enroll in the present seminar as well.
Sequence and Prerequisites: Contract Law and Property Law are prerequisites.
Evaluation: Each student at the University of Illinois will be expected to team up (by Zoom) with at least one student from Penn to prepare questions and comments for the authors on one of the papers to be read and discussed in one of the fourteen sessions of the seminar. In addition, Illinois students will be expected to prepare a 5-10 page paper exploring in greater depth one of the topics discussed during the semester. This can be the topic on which the student also prepared questions for in-class discussion. There will no exam or other formal requirements other than regular attendance and participation.
This course is a one-week intensive, held in Chicago prior to the start of spring semester, that that focuses on the development and advancement of core competencies necessary for the successful trial lawyer. These competencies include critical motion practice, depositions, settlement mediation, electronic discovery, jury selection, and courtroom presentation skills. The course emphasizes learning core advocacy skills through the performance of courtroom exercises, including a trial to be held following the conclusion of the course. The ABA Model Rules of Professional Responsibility are integrated at all aspects of the course. Courtroom exercises teach students to identify and ethically resolve professional responsibility issues confronting trial lawyers. The course is taught by experienced trial lawyers and judges in the Chicago area who critique daily courtroom performance exercises and who judge the final trial. As a week-long intensive experience, classes and performance exercises will be held daily from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. The final trials will be held in Chicago on Saturday, January 23rd. The College of Law will provide hotel accommodations for registered students, as well as reimbursement for travel to and from Chicago. Registration is open to all 3Ls who have completed Evidence and Trial Advocacy; registration in the Chicago Program is NOT required. This course is eligible to satisfy the Professional Responsibility and Ethics Course requirement for graduation.
Course Sequence and Prerequisites: Evidence (Law 682) and Trial Advocacy (Law 694) must have been taken prior to this course.
Evaluation: This course will be evaluated through daily quizzes concerning professional ethics, daily courtroom performance exercises, and a final mock trial. Students will receive a grade for this course.
Course Classification: Experiential
This skills-based course will serve as an introduction to taking and defending depositions, providing opportunities to practice preparing for and conducting mock depositions. This course will consist of classroom discussions on deposition best practices in conjunction with assignments to implement those practices, including mock depositions over Zoom. This is a pass/fail course.
Course Sequence/Prerequisite: Evidence (682) must be taken either concurrently or previously.
Evaluation: Taking and Defending Depositions is a two-credit pass/fail course. Assessment will be based on class participation and assignments throughout the semester.
Course Classification: Experiential
The rules of evidence dictate the manner of criminal and civil trials. Understanding
The rules of evidence dictate the manner of criminal and civil trials. Understanding evidence impacts the questions attorneys will ask, the exhibits and testimony that the jury will consider, the quality of the advocacy and, even, the outcome at trial. This course connects the substantive rules of evidence and evidentiary determinations with the skills of trial advocacy. Students will learn how arguments under the rules of evidence and evidentiary rulings play out in the courtroom. Students will write and argue motions in limine, make offers of proof, conduct examinations, argue evidentiary objections and render decisions on evidence as trial judge. This course will focus on advocacy skills rooted in understanding evidence, such as motions in limine, evidentiary foundations, modes of impeachment and making a record for appeal. This course will not cover the aspects of trial advocacy that do not relate significantly to the rules of evidence, such as trial preparation and organization, themes and theories, voir dire, opening statements and closing arguments. While the course will on utilizing the rules of evidence in the courtroom setting, it is beneficial to any student who wishes to master the rules of evidence and advance their knowledge of substantive evidentiary law.
Course Sequence/Prerequisite: Evidence (682) must have been taken prior to this course. Trial Advocacy is highly recommended (either completing prior to the class or concurrently, but is not required).
Evaluation: This is a three-hour graded course. Grades will be based on written assignments, classroom participation, performance in exercises, and a final examination. All students will be required to complete a substantial motion writing exercise. Students may complete this requirement to satisfy the upper-level legal writing requirement.