General Course Descriptions for Terms: securities
815 - Appellate Advocacy (moot court-Kaufman Securities))
854 - Clinical Program: Law & Entrepreneurship (L&E)
The student attorneys in the Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic (“L&E Clinic”) act as business and corporate counsel to more than 200 clients per year. Participation requires thinking like a lawyer and acting like an entrepreneur. Students work on legal needs including business formation, capital structure, angel and venture-backed securities, and employment and founders' contracts. Students interested in intellectual property issues will file trademark and patent applications, perform patentability and freedom-to-operate analyses, and write proprietary and open-source licenses for technology clients. The L&E Clinic operates similarly to a private practice law firm. Participants manage their own client load, bill time, manage and prepare documents, and report to supervising attorneys, other students and outside partners.
914 - Securities Regulation
This course analyzes the regulations governing the capital formation process in the United States. The course explains the process by which companies register securities with the SEC in order to go public, and the reporting obligations that arise once companies are publicly traded. The course also analyzes the process by which companies raise capital through private placements (the dominant capital formation process in Silicon Valley), restrictions on the resale of privately placed securities, recent legislation allowing "crowdfunding" of certain enterprises, and the securities law liabilities that arise in these transactions. About a third of the course consists of problem sets based on a series of “motivating hypotheticals.” Students will therefore gain hands-on experience in analyzing problems and advising clients in a complex regulatory area.
940 - Legislation & Regulation
This course provides an introduction to the federal laws and governmental institutions that shape significant aspects of social and economic policy. The course addresses legislation, statutory interpretation, regulation and administrative agencies. Legislation and regulation play the dominant role in shaping law and governance in the modern American legal system. While numerous other law school courses involve statutes and regulations or legislatures and administrative agencies, this course considers the overarching questions about these laws and institutions: how statutes are enacted and agency regulations issued, what tools lawyers use to shape statutes and regulations, how judges interpret them, etc. The main goal of the course is practical. All lawyers, irrespective of the area of law—from securities law to criminal law, from environmental law to tax, from labor and employment law to contract drafting, from military law to bankruptcy, etc.—must understand statutes and regulation. This course is aimed at providing students with a deeper understanding of these forms of law and the institutions that make this law, and to help them better appreciate the role that lawyers play in the American legal system as it operates in practice. To think like a lawyer, and hence to represent or advise clients, requires an ability to do so in the context of the regulatory state. This course meets the Legal Process graduation requirement. Learning Outcomes: (i) To understand the role of legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts in the legal process. (ii) To understand the relationship between and among these institutions. (iii) To understand the role that lawyers play in furthering their clients’ interests in each of these institutions. (iv) To understand the differences in the forms of legal argument that occur in these different institutions. (v) To understand how courts interpret statutes. (vi) To understand how administrative agencies interpret and implement statutes. (vii) To understand how courts oversee the interpretation and implementation of statutes by administrative agencies.
950 - Arbitration
Arbitration is a process that involves a third-party neutral, who is granted jurisdiction to issue “final and binding” (usually) decisions through a privately- (or sometimes legislatively-) established adjudicatory process. Although still referred to under the umbrella of “alternative” approaches to dispute resolution, arbitration has become a mainstream method for resolving conflicts. Used in the mid-twentieth century primarily for application in the collective bargaining environment, the use of arbitration has expanded into nearly every conceivable category of dispute: employment, commercial, construction, securities, domestic, and sports, among others. This course will explore the process and practice of arbitration. Through an examination of episodes of the first season of the popular 1980s television show “Love Boat”, the course will engage students in a semester-long mock arbitration case from evidence-gathering through the hearing phase. In the process of preparing for and presenting the case, students will be introduced to readings, guest speakers (time permitting), and analytical discussions focused on fundamental arbitration concepts that will be applicable in many future settings. Learning Objectives: 1. Become familiar with the nuts and bolts of the arbitration process. 2. Understand the legal and philosophical foundations of the arbitration process. 3. Through a simulated case, practice applying the theories and techniques of arbitration as an opportunity for reflection and evaluation.