Post Date: October 6, 2006

Dean Elena Kagan

The Harvard Law School faculty unanimously adopted a reform of the required first-year curriculum yesterday, after a three-year process of study and consultation with legal academics, faculty from other professional schools, and practicing lawyers.

"This marks a major step forward in our efforts to develop a law school curriculum for the 21st century," said Dean Elena Kagan. "Over 100 years ago, Harvard Law School invented the basic law school curriculum, and we are now making the most significant revisions to it since that time. Thanks to yesterday's unanimous faculty vote, we will add new first-year courses in international and comparative law, legislation and regulation, and complex problem solving -- areas of great and ever-growing importance in today’s world. I am extraordinarily grateful to the entire faculty for its vision and support of these far-reaching reforms, which I am confident will give our students the best possible training for the leadership positions they will soon occupy."

Professor Martha Minow, who chaired the process, added: "We believe these changes will better prepare our students to think about and practice in a legal world in which regulations and statutes play an equal or more important role in the creation and elaboration of law as do court decisions; in which transactions and interactions among parties are increasingly global in nature; and in which economic, cultural and technological changes call upon the best lawyers to become skilled in system design, problem solving and creative approaches to issues."

Specifically, the changes seek to ensure:

• greater attention to statutes and regulations;
• introduction to the institutions and processes of public law;
• systematic attention to international and comparative law and economic systems;
• opportunities for students to address alone and in teams complex, fact-intensive problems as they arise in the world (rather than digested into legal doctrines in appellate opinions) and to generate and evaluate solutions through private ordering, regulation, litigation and other strategies;
• more sustained occasions to reflect on the entire enterprise of law and legal studies, the assumptions and methods of contemporary U.S. law and the perspectives provided by other disciplines, and to develop a common fund of ideas and approaches relevant to designing effective and just laws and institutions.

To pursue these goals, the law school will add three new course requirements to the first-year curriculum:

1. A new course focusing on legislation and regulation;
2. Each student will take one of three specially crafted courses introducing global legal systems and concerns - Public International Law, International Economic Law, and Comparative Law;
3. A new course, Problems and Theories, will focus on problem solving, while introducing students to theoretical frameworks illuminating legal doctrines and institutions.

These reforms complement a reform of the upper level curriculum adopted by the faculty last spring that promotes concentrated and focused study, and application by developing distinctive Programs of Study, organizing classroom, clinical, research, and work opportunities to help students pursue greater progression and depth before graduation. Initial Programs of Study are: Law and Government; Law and Business; Law, Science and Technology; Law and the International Sphere; and Law and Social Change. The new first-year curriculum provides a foundation to enable any student who wishes to pursue an advanced Program of Study.

For both sets of reforms, there will be a period of transition and phase-in, and also a process of ongoing assessment of the reforms with opportunities to refine and revise the curriculum over time.

In greater detail, here are descriptions of the new courses:

• "Legislation and Regulation": This course will introduce students to the world of legislation, regulation and administration that creates and defines so much of our legal order. At the same time, it will begin to teach students to think about processes and structures of government and how they influence and affect legal outcomes. The course will introduce students to, and include materials on, most or all of the following topics: the separation of powers; the legislative process; statutory interpretation; delegation and administrative agency practice; and regulatory tools and strategies. The course will naturally lead into, and enable students to get more out of, advanced courses in the 2L and 3L years, on legislation, administrative law, a wide range of regulatory subjects (e.g., environmental law, securities law, telecommunications law), and constitutional law.
• International/comparative courses: From the beginning of law school, students should learn to locate what they are learning about public and private law in the United States within the context of a larger universe - global networks of economic regulation and private ordering, public systems created through multilateral relations among states, and different and widely varying legal cultures and systems. Accordingly, the Law School will develop three foundation courses, each of which represents a door into the global sphere that students will use as context for U.S. law. A course on public international law will introduce students to the sources, institutions and procedures emerging over time through the bilateral and multilateral arrangements among states as well as the participation of nongovernmental actors. A course on international economic law will introduce students to the network of economic regulation and private ordering affecting commercial transactions, trade, banking and other systems for facilitating and regulating economic relations around the globe. A third course, on comparative law, will introduce students to one or more legal systems outside our own, to the borrowing and transmission of legal ideas across borders and to a variety of approaches to substantive and procedural law that are rooted in distinct cultures and traditions. Students will be allowed to elect any one of these courses in the first year.
• "Problems and Theories": Coming after the close of the first term, the new course on problems and theories will allow students to reflect on what they have learned through systematic treatment of methods of statutory and case analysis, discussion of different theories of law and work on a complex problem (or problems) beyond the bounds of any single doctrinal subject, explored through simulation and team work. The course’s focus will be on complex problem solving. The basic materials used will be case studies of complicated situations involving facts and diverse bodies of law and demanding both creativity and analytic rigor in generating and assessing solutions.

Room for the new first-year courses will be created by devoting fewer class hours to the traditional first-year curriculum (contracts, torts, civil procedure, criminal law, and property) and by revising the school’s calendar to create a new January term for first-year students, devoted exclusively to the Problems and Theories class.