An introduction to federal income taxation, with emphasis on the determination of income subject to taxation, deductions in computing taxable income, the proper time period for reporting income and deductions, and the proper taxpayer on which to impose the tax.

Many attorneys are required to evaluate financial data, notably financial statements from corporations, on a regular basis. The need is not limited to corporate attorneys; indeed litigators in securities, antitrust, malpractice, or general commercial litigation frequently must analyze financial information. This course serves to both introduce basic accounting principles and practices and their relationship to the law, as well as to study a number of contemporary accounting problems relating to financial disclosure and the accountant's professional responsibility. Students with accounting degrees, MBAs or who have taken more than a couple of accounting courses are not permitted to enroll. Also, Business Essentials may not be taken concurrently with this course.

Lawyers face non-legal, analytical issues every day. Business lawyers need to understand a business in order to represent their client properly. Litigators need to judge the best route in adopting a litigation strategy. Family lawyers routinely need to value a business. Environmental lawyers need to understand economic externalities. Social lawyers need familiarity with financial instruments that have positive and negative attributes. Students taking this course will find it foundational in running a business, advising a business, or litigating business matters that go beyond the strict letter of the law. In this sense, this is not your standard doctrinal law school course. Rather, it is designed to give students the tools necessary to interact with the business community and run a company or firm. While there is no prerequisite for this course, students should be comfortable with numbers and graphs.

The areas of focus include:

1. Decision Analysis, Games and Information: We will explore a standard technique that has been developed to organize thinking about decision-making problems and to solve them.
2. Accounting: Basic accounting concepts will be introduced, and the relationship between accounting information and economic reality will be examined.
3. Microeconomics: This unit presents basic economic concepts--the operation of competitive markets, imperfect competition, and market failures--that are necessary to this understanding.
4. Statistics: We will address the basic statistical methods, including regression analysis, as well as issues that commonly arise when statistics are used in the courtroom.

The course grade will be made up of (roughly) weekly problem sets, and a final examination.

In a first-year torts course, it is possible only to scratch of the surface of products liability law’s history, substantive and procedural complexity, theoretical underpinnings, and policy implications. Given its intricacy, practical significance, and usefulness as a window into tort law more generally, products liability is an ideal subject for an upper-level torts course. This dedicated products liability course offers students the opportunity to delve more deeply into the thorny legal doctrines and problems of proof that arise in the practice of products liability law. The course also gives students the chance to revisit many issues of general importance to tort law, including: strict liability versus negligence as potential bases for recovery in tort; the allocation of liability among plaintiffs and multiple tortfeasors; the interaction between doctrines of liability and problems of proof; and the relationships among economic regulation, social insurance, the law of contracts, and the law of torts.

While enrolled in LAW 371 Products Liability, students may submit a 30+ page significant research paper which would be eligible for satisfaction of the JD-ULWR.

This two-credit experiential course will focus on the analytical, writing and presentation, and interview skills frequently used in practice while also introducing students to the general statutory and regulatory frameworks governing securities litigation and enforcement.  Litigating private securities claims and defending SEC enforcement actions are an important component of most sophisticated litigation practice; these actions have high stakes, and are almost inevitable for many corporate clients.  Writing assignments and presentations will be drawn from one hypothetical class action problem, and one hypothetical enforcement action problem.