This is not a pipe dream!  I honestly believe that in the fall of 2017, this will be a reality for me.  (I typically teach Business Associations in the fall semester to a large number of students who understand “cases,” not “deals.”)

The reason for my good spirits and honest belief in the positive change in my students?  Our new 1L curriculum, which is rolling out this fall.  No doubt, we will find some changes that need to be made as we implement our relatively bold plan.  But I am truly excited that the new first-year curriculum exposes every student to a transactional experience in the first year of law school.  

There are many reasons for implementing this kind of change, of course.  Among other things, this new approach to the first year at UT Law responds to suggestions that we got from our students and represents an effort to better connect the 1L year to our upper division curriculum (on which we have spent a lot of time over the years).  The new 1L transactional offering is part of a larger plan constructed by a College of Law committee, chaired by my colleague (and e-discovery queen) Paula Schaefer, that spent several years looking at our overall curriculum and that of many other schools before fashioning a number of alternative options for the faculty to review.  

The implementation involves a lot of work.  Many colleagues are chipping in to construct new courses and re-fashion existing courses to meet the new curricular requirements.  It takes a village.  I am grateful for all of the work being put in.  I work with a great bunch of folks.

An article in the National Jurist last week describes the new 1L curriculum in general.  Our academic policies, however, add some detail.  I quote from them below, with some reformatting for easier reading in this space.

For students entering in or after Fall 2016, the first-year curriculum is as follows:

First Semester
Civil Procedure I* (3)
Contracts I (3)
Criminal Law (3)
Lawyering & Professionalism (1) Legal Process I (3)
Torts I* (3)

Second Semester
Civil Procedure II (3)
Contracts II (3)
Legal Process II (3)
Property (4)
Torts II (2)
Transactional Lawyering Lab (1)

*First-year students enroll in an experiential section of either Civil Procedure I or Torts I. The experiential sections include three graded, simulation-based assignments. Each simulation places students in the role of lawyer, raises professionalism issues, requires students to perform a lawyering skill, and results in a written and/or oral work product. In addition to a final examination, the course also includes a midterm exam that includes at least one essay question.

We are pretty excited to get this new curricular show on the road.  I look forward to sharing more with you as we see how students react in the short term and long term.  But my UT Law colleagues and I are very hopeful that this new approach to the first year will lay a strong foundation for upper division academic work and for practice.