General Course Descriptions for Terms: evidence
798 - Professional Responsibility & Criminal Practice (Defender Project)
Covers the Wisconsin Rules of Professional Conduct as specifically applied to criminal defense practice. Topics covered include perjured testimony, confidentiality, client counseling, witness interviewing, handling evidence, hard bargaining, statements regarding judicial qualifications and contempt of court.
801 - Evidence
The rules of evidence define how facts are proven in civil and criminal litigation. While this body of law is set in the context of formal trial practice, understanding evidentiary principles provides the foundation for advice and negotiations in law practices of all types. The course will focus on the Federal Rules of Evidence while noting significant differences with important Wisconsin Rules of Evidence. Students will gain a broad, working knowledge of evidentiary rules and their foundational policies along with an in-depth understanding of how to apply specific rules in specific circumstances. With an emphasis on the practical application of the rules of evidence, analysis of appellate case law will play a limited role in the course. Instead, class discussions will emphasize hands-on solving of specific problems, formulating questions, making and ruling on objections, and planning how to get facts before a jury or judge.
849 - Pre-Trial Advocacy
Pre-trial Advocacy is a practical course. The focus is on skills one needs in a litigation practice to prepare to try a case. These skills include case intake analysis, interviewing skills, discovery creation and responses, depositions, mediation, and trial preparation. In all phases, the focus is on strategy and practical materials to help students thrive in any litigation practice after graduation. There are no strict pre-requisites for 3L students, but historically students have benefitted most from the class with solid background in evidence and civil procedure.
854 - Clinical Program: Wisconsin Innocence Project
This clinic provides students with an opportunity to study, investigate, and litigate claims of innocence. You’ll be working to screen applicants to the clinic, completing investigation on pending cases, and working on active clinic cases. Student attorneys in WIP are expected to learn how to investigate and litigate criminal post conviction cases. Students will develop skills in interviewing clients and maintaining attorney-client relationships; finding, approaching, and speaking with witnesses; and obtaining other forms of evidence. Student-attorneys are also expected to develop the ethical and professional norms required in law practice, including diligence, competence, punctuality, and effective inter- and intra-office communication. In the seminar portion of the course, students are expected to learn about and discuss the causes of wrongful conviction, the legal framework in which actual innocence cases are litigated, and efforts to reform the criminal legal system so as to reduce the incidence of wrongful convictions and provide redress to those who have been wrongfully convicted.
915 - SP Crim. J. Admin: Law & Forensic Science
Forensic evidence used in criminal cases has come under intense scrutiny recently because much of it never has been scientifically validated and some has been proven to be highly unreliable. More than ten years ago, the National Academy of Sciences issued a groundbreaking report concluding as much. Yet forensic “science” rarely is studied in either the law school curriculum or in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) curriculum, either at the undergraduate or graduate level. This is the first course at the University of Wisconsin—and among the first in the nation—to fill that void by bringing together law students and STEM students to examine law & forensic science.
940 - Mental Health Law
Introduces students to the cases, statutes, and legal doctrines related to rights, treatment, and hospitalization and incarceration of mentally ill or developmentally disabled persons. Includes issues such as voluntary and involuntary civil commitment and the arc of its history to current legal standards; competency and restoration to competency issues for criminal defendants; the insanity defense history, legal standards, and lack of criminal responsibility in our society today; the right to refuse psychiatric treatment and ramifications of such laws; social science research in law such as eyewitness memory, interrogation and confession evidence; the regulation of the mental health system and mental health providers (and its positives and negatives), civil commitment of sex offenders, drug/alcohol and courts, the police function and mental health and personal mental health for lawyers.
950 - Empirical Analysis and the Law
In many areas of law and law-making, attorneys are increasingly called upon to evaluate and present empirical evidence to support their claims. Fortunately, most empirical research today uses only a handful of research methods. In this seminar, you will learn about these methods and the types of legal questions that they can address. The goal of this seminar is not to equip students to become producers of empirical research, but rather, to help students become better consumers of empirical research and in so doing, build an important set of skills for legal practice. No special preparation or background in empirical methods is necessary for this course and this course will not require you to produce your own empirical research. For example, we will not cover methods of collecting data or coding. Rather, class time and assignments will be primarily devoted to: (1) understanding the intuitions behind the most widely-used empirical methods in law, and (2) giving you the tools you need to be able to read empirical work with a critical eye, including basic literacy in statistics.