Teaching & Learning Resources: Resources for Specific Courses

Sixty-four leading legal historians ruminate on their own approaches to teaching legal history in nearly a third of the American law schools: what they teach, why they teach as they do, how they structure their courses, and what they expect their students and themselves to take away from the study of legal history.

Provides a resource for teachers interested in learning about the field of law and literature and shows how to bring its insights to bear in their classrooms, both in the liberal arts and in law schools. Essays in the first section, "Theory and History of the Movement," provide a retrospective of the field and look forward to new developments. The second section, "Model Courses," offers readers an array of possibilities for structuring courses that integrate legal issues with the study of literature, from The Canterbury Tales to current prison literature. In "Texts," the third section, guidance is provided for teaching not only written documents (novels, plays, trial reports) but also cultural objects: digital media, Native American ceremonies, documentary theater, hip-hop.

Success in every law school course, regardless of doctrine, requires that students acquire and become expert at applying a set of skills that can be taught explicitly throughout the course. This book highlights ways that various academic skills (such as case briefing, close case reading, note taking, outlining, and exam preparation), legal reasoning skills (such as fact identification and analysis, issue spotting, and working with rules), and theoretical perspectives (such as socioeconomics, legal realism, and critical legal theory) can be incorporated directly into the syllabi of first-year courses in general, and contracts courses in particular.