Course Schedule

This course addresses the law of privacy and personal data protection under two dominant, but quite different, legal regimes. In this course, we will review privacy fundamentals – principles, risks, and harms - within the U.S. legal framework, including federal consumer, financial, and health privacy laws, and historical and emerging state laws. We will discuss and evaluate important aspects of the evolving U.S. legal framework and the EU GDPR (and other, recent European data laws), taking into account unique challenges posed by the evolution of digital data technology such as biometric data processing, breach response, cross-border data transfers, technological automony, and artificial intelligence.

The one semester, two credit course will examine the basics of the Fifth Amendment privilege as well as each of the evidentiary privileges recognized in federal courts.  The course will examine why the societal benefits achieved by allowing persons to exercise their respective privileges outweighs the evidentiary value of introducing privileged information into evidence.  We will examine which person or party owns and may invoke each privilege, how each privilege can be lost or abused, and how lawyers must strive to protect their client’s privileges and avoid impinging on the privileges held by others. Students will examine how non lawyers often misconstrue and demean a person’s exercise of their respective privileges.    A course in Evidence is a pre- or co-requisite. While the course may be of primary interest to students intending to be civil litigation attorneys, prosecutors or criminal defense attorneys, students with non-litigation interests will also benefit from the issues discussed during the course.   

The final evaluation will require students to prepare a bench memorandum for a hypothetical federal district court judge analyzing constitutional and evidentiary privilege disputes that will be described in a factual record.

This bench memorandum should be 12 to 15 typed written pages.  Students will be given two weeks to prepare the memorandum.  Students will be permitted and encouraged to do legal research, to use spell and grammar check but will not be permitted to use AI.

This course approaches the subject of professional responsibility as a study of how society regulates the legal profession and the conduct of lawyers. First, we study the organized regulation of the profession, which includes the following topics: (1) the admission of lawyers, (2) the establishment of the legal services monopoly through unauthorized practice of law statutes, (3) the state and federal systems for disciplining lawyers, and (4) the clients. Second, we study the regulation of the conduct of individual lawyers through the transactional perspectives: (1) formation of the attorney- client relationship, (2) performance of the representation, and (3) termination of the relationship. We also spend significant time examining the three contexts of regulating lawyers' conduct: (1) the disciplinary committee, (2) the private malpractice action, and (3) judicial regulation as part of the lawyer's representation of a client. Although we discuss the Model Code and the Model Rules, this course does not focus on the rules of professional responsibility as the sole source of ethical guidelines. The course should prepare you for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam; however, it is more useful as an introduction to identifying and resolving ethical problems in practice. In addition, it is your first introduction to the practice of law as a profession. Student grades are assessed through an in class exam with objective questions and essay questions; a 5 page outside paper, and completing the multiple choice questions in the Casebook Plus online module.

This course approaches the subject of professional responsibility as a study of how society regulates the legal profession and the conduct of lawyers. First, we study the organized regulation of the profession, which includes the following topics: (1) the admission of lawyers, (2) the establishment of the legal services monopoly through unauthorized practice of law statutes, (3) the state and federal systems for disciplining lawyers, and (4) the clients. Second, we study the regulation of the conduct of individual lawyers through the transactional perspectives: (1) formation of the attorney- client relationship, (2) performance of the representation, and (3) termination of the relationship. We also spend significant time examining the three contexts of regulating lawyers' conduct: (1) the disciplinary committee, (2) the private malpractice action, and (3) judicial regulation as part of the lawyer's representation of a client. Although we discuss the Model Code and the Model Rules, this course does not focus on the rules of professional responsibility as the sole source of ethical guidelines. The course should prepare you for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam; however, it is more useful as an introduction to identifying and resolving ethical problems in practice. In addition, it is your first introduction to the practice of law as a profession. Student grades are assessed through an in class exam with objective questions and essay questions; a 5 page outside paper, and completing the multiple choice questions in the Casebook Plus online module.

This course will introduce students to core concepts and doctrines in the field of professional responsibility. It will touch on all of the subjects needed to prepare for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination. The class will be taught through case examples and problems. Students will take an in-class examination. This course fulfills the Professional Responsibility requirement for graduation. 

A survey of interests in land and limited topics involving chattels: estates, cotenancy, landlord and tenant issues, conveyancing, private and public control of land use.

This course provides a comprehensive overview of federal, state, and local laws governing the possession, use, and administration of psychedelics. Students will gain a foundational understanding of the policy reform movements shaping psychedelic law across the country, with a comparative analysis of enacted and proposed legislation at various levels of government. The course will explore federally legal pathways for therapeutic participation, including ketamine treatment, drug development studies, and other research initiatives. Additionally, students will examine legal exemptions under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and related case law. Students will be expected to participate in discussion each week and in one group project taking place during class. This course has no textbook and no specific prerequisites. No technical background is required.

This course provides a basic introduction to public international law. It will survey the basic principles of international law including: the sources of international law; the law and interpretation of treaties; the relationship between international and domestic law; and jurisdictional competencies. It will also examine a number of specific subjects including: the use of force; human rights; humanitarian law; international criminal law; and terrorism.

This three-credit survey course focuses on the legal issues that pervade the conservation and regulation of public lands, wildlife, fisheries, and wetlands. These issues include, among others, competing claims of the "public interest" versus private property rights; the roles of administrative agencies and the judiciary in environmental decision making; tensions presented by the multiple use/sustainable yield standard in federal law; conflicts among and between local, state, and federal approaches to natural resource regulation; and the opposing goals of resource management espoused by fishermen, farmers, developers, environmentalists, and recreational users. These issues will be developed in the context of the regulatory schemes embodied in the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Water Act and the various statutes that govern federal public lands, such as the Wilderness Act and Federal Land Policy Management Act. The focus of the course is primarily U.S. law; however, it will touch on international law relevant to natural resources and, where appropriate, compare U.S. law to the laws of other countries.

This course introduce students to the avenues and theories lawyers can utilize to conceptualize and seek social change. Through readings and discussion, we will explore past, present, and future movement lawyering strategies and concepts, including aspects of the civil rights movement, prison abolition, and Afrofuturism. We will examine the ways lawyers engage with communities, clients, and political causes, as well as the ethical issues that may arise when advocating on behalf of class members with divergent interests. Although the law can serve as an effective tool for change, it has its limitations. This course will help us recognize the need for movement lawyers to work in partnership with communities, organizers, and policymakers to achieve justice. Depending on scheduling and availability, this course will incorporate guest speakers engaged in movement lawyering, community organizers, and public policy. Students will be expected to read, watch, and listen to the assigned materials and actively participate in discussion. Students will leave with a deeper knowledge of social justice lawyering, and an understanding of how to recognize the law’s limitations as a singular tool to achieve social, political, economic, and racial equality.

Real Estate Finance for Lawyers covers real estate secured credit transactions. The course does not require any mathematical calculations. Students will find some knowledge or experience in the real estate industry is helpful, but not required. Completion of or concurrent enrollment in Secured Credit (Law 380D) is helpful, but not required. The course will begin with an introduction to the real estate finance industry, including various types of loans, lenders, vocabulary and law. From there, we will cover basic versions of the most common documents used in real estate secured financings, and progress to state of the art documents for large/complex transactions. The course will cover the case and statutory law central to some of the most important provisions. The relative interests of borrowers, lenders and other parties, and possible topics for negotiation, will be discussed throughout the course. Students will find that while this course concentrates on real estate secured lending, it has broad practical application to most lending and other business transactions. Course materials will be supplied by the Professor in PDF format.

The scope of this class is both domestic and international and crosses multiple disciplines and fields of law. The course touches many aspects of the processes of creating art, buying and selling it, using it, or displaying it in a museum. Additionally, the course covers the more nefarious legal issues in art and cultural property, including forgery, theft, illegal movement, and art in war, focusing on art stolen in the Holocaust.

Recent scientific studies show that the world is on the brink of a sixth mass extinction, comparable to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago. But as disheartening as that conclusion is, the data also suggest that it’s not too late to avoid the extinction event by addressing the threats faced by animals and plants around the globe. This course explores law and policy around the broad themes of biodiversity, wildlife and habitat. We will examine a range of international and U.S. laws in place to conserve biodiversity and the gaps in protection that exist. We will focus on international conventions, statutes, including the Endangered Species Act, case law, environmental ethics and several current controversies to explore legal, scientific, and political strategies for protecting at-risk species and their habitats in an increasingly complex, interconnected world.

Most of the students' grade will be based on a paper on an approved topic and a presentation on the paper topic given to the class during one of the last weeks of the semester.  

This writing seminar will focus on the substantive and procedural legal issues which relate to the protection of children. The first six classes of the seminar will provide an overview of child protection issues, primarily in the Child Protective Service system. The first class will include a presentation on child abuse and neglect cases; what it is and what it is not. The distinction between criminal child abuse cases and civil child protection (CPS) cases will be discussed.  The next five classes will cover the duty to report child abuse, the removal of children from their homes, termination of parental rights, systemic problems within the foster care system, the rights of children and their parents in child protection proceedings, and the criminal prosecution of child abuse. The readings for the first six classes are posted on canvas or cites for the internet link and Westlaw are provided in the syllabus and on canvas. Students are expected to read and be prepared to discuss the assigned readings in class. Additional readings and discussion may be supplemented which could include the interplay of the protection of children with other areas of the law such as immigration, education, and family law. Students will choose a topic for their own paper, after individual discussions with the professor to that end. Grades will be based on the 1) outline, 2) first draft of paper, 3) feedback in writing regarding mandatory observation of CPS docket, 4) class participation, 5) in-class presentation of paper, 6) critique of another student's paper, and 7) 30 page final paper.

Professor Connie Rosati (Department of Philosophy & Law)

Commentators, scholars, and even Supreme Court justices often write about constitutional originalism with little understanding of the variety of originalist theories that exist. These theories, from textualism to libertarian originalism to living originalism, differ markedly.  In particular, they differ in how would handle questions concerning “implied” or “unenumerated” rights.  In this seminar, we will explore various contemporary versions of originalism, as well as some of the many criticisms that originalism has faced. 

This course is not restricted 3L students though there is some preference given; second-year law students are welcome. There is no final exam for the course, your grade will be determined by the quality of your class participation and your six written and two oral projects. We will discuss all aspects of investigating, charging, trying, sentencing, and appealing federal criminal charges. We will take attendance, and we expect each of you to attend and to participate in every class discussion. Interns enrolled in the internship program at the United States Attorney's Office for the Western District of Texas or the Austin Federal Public Defender Service are encouraged to enroll in this seminar, and will be guaranteed admission if they request it.

Guns and drugs: This seminar will traverse the litigation landscape of harms to communities resulting from the actions of the firearms industry and harmful pharmaceuticals. The first half of this seminar introduces the tort theory of public nuisance and describes the changing landscape of 21st century mass tort litigation involving public harms – including lead paint, opioids, e-cigarettes, climate change, and environmental pollution. We will explore the novel theory of public nuisance that lawyers and local governments have used to receive compensation from those who have created public nuisances. We will discuss the origins and evolution of the theory of public nuisance from the twelfth century into modern-day American jurisprudence. We will survey the conflicting judicial decisions rooted in common law and statutory interpretation and evaluate the competing arguments for and against the expansion of public nuisance law. The first portion of the course will focus on applications of public nuisance theory to resolve mass torts relating to lead paint, opioids, vaping, and environmental pollution. We will examine the competing theories arguing in favor of and in opposition to the expansion of public nuisance theory to address and remediate modern community harms. The text for this portion of the seminar is Linda S. Mullenix, PUBLIC NUISANCE: THE NEW MASS TORT FRONTIER (Cambridge University Press 2024). The second half of the course comprehensively addresses the changed legal landscape concerning the ability of governments and private citizens to sue gun industry defendants for contributing to and sustaining the gun violence epidemic in the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America. The discussion canvasses federal and state efforts to regulate firearms through gun control measures, arguing that these regulatory measures have proven ineffective to stem the tide of gun violence. We will then examine the Congressional enactment in 2005 of the Protection of Legal Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) that immunizes the firearms industry from civil liability for gun violence harms. We will discuss the extent to which PLCAA has frustrated the ability of plaintiffs to hold the firearms industry accountable through litigation. We will discuss the theory that recourse to robust consumer protection and mass tort litigation provides the optimal avenue for holding the firearms industry accountable. The analysis highlights three inflection points in the history of gun industry accountability: the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, the Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School litigation, and the very recent nine states’ enactment of consumer protection and public nuisance firearms statutes. These innovative statutes have created an avenue for firearms litigation that overcomes the firearm industry’s historical immunity from suit anchored in PLCAA. The text for this portion of the course is Linda S. Mullenix, OUTGUNNED NO MORE: THE NEW ERA OF FIREARMS ACCOUNTABILITY (Cambridge University Press 2025). This is a writing seminar. Each student in the seminar will be required to complete three papers during the semester. Students will choose the weeks in which they wish to submit papers. Each paper will analytically present and discuss issues or debates relating to the weekly reading assignments. Each student, at the beginning of the semester, chooses the paper topics and timing of the papers.

This class will focus on a variety of subjects relating to the delivery of health care services, including patient safety and health care quality, regulation of health care providers, and the payment system. Readings will be of diverse types, including articles published in law reviews, medical journals, and other outlets; empirical studies; popular writings; and even news articles and blog columns. Because students are required to make in-class presentations and submit short papers, space is limited and attendance is required.

You will be required to read Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much For Health Care by Professor Silver and David Hyman, a professor at the Georgetown Law Center.  Professor Silver receives no royalties on sales of the book, the price of which is extremely low.  Americans are overcharged for health care, but students will not be overcharged for taking this course.

Disclosure:  

In this class, we will debate issues of health care policy robustly.  Students who have strong opinions on these issues, whether because of their religious faith, culture, personal experiences, or other reasons, are hereby informed that all beliefs may be challenged on all available grounds, including lack of scientific support, excessive cost, and immorality.  Examples of practices that may be discussed, criticized, and debated openly in class include female genital mutilation, male circumcision, faith-based healing of children with treatable diseases, honor killings, abortion, prohibitions on contraception and sex outside of marriage, drug laws, policies requiring rape victims to marry their abusers, and mask and vaccine mandates.  If you have strong beliefs on these or other health care matters that you do not wish to have questioned or criticized, you should not take this class.

Sports, whether mere individual physical exercise, simple competitive games, or national/international competition, often intersect with human rights law. Owing to sport’s long tradition of independence and autonomy, national and international jurisdictions only intervene in a limited way in sporting affairs.  This does not mean, however, that there are not questions to be asked, particularly when it comes to protecting international human rights. In fact, sport relies on a rules-based system in all its facets, including athletes, fans, workers, volunteers and local communities, as well as governments, businesses large and small, the media and sports bodies. This seminar examines and unpacks human rights standards and legal commitments to show how human rights are impacted by sporting events or sport activity. The class will address issues such as the human rights of athletes, the basic right to participate in sport and physical activity, remedies for victims of human rights abuses tied to major global sporting events; discrimination against women, LGBT people and persons with disabilities in sport; campaigns against racism and apartheid in sports; the existence of disciplinary systems in the sports movement and the growing number of situations and cases of potential or actual clashes between the running of competitions and human rights standards (e.g. individuals rights in the context of anti-doping, corruption, and match-fixing). In particular, the seminar will discuss cases decided by human rights courts, such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights (ECHR), and specialized sports arbitration mechanisms, notably the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

This seminar will cover major legal and philosophical issues surrounding parentage. For example, we will examine the normative and historical grounding for parental rights, and apply the lessons learned to current questions about the robustness of parental rights when they conflict with a) the potential rights of children or b) the interests of the state. The seminar will also cover the logically prior question of who is a parent? Here, the seminar will delve into the bioethics and philosophical literature on why genetic parents are the default legal parents, and under what circumstances this default should change. We will also examine current law, including various recent legal developments on de facto parentage and disestablishing paternity, to uncover implicit judgments current law makes about the nature of parentage. Other questions that the seminar will address include: Can/Should the government require potential parents to obtain a license before becoming legal parents? What is the proper balance of power in the state-parent-child triad? What are the ethical dimensions of the decision to have children? What obligations might grown children owe to their parents?

This three credit seminar course will focus on the environmental impacts and resulting political, legal and international issues arising from the exploration, development, production, transportation and delivery of energy sources. The development and use of every source of energy has environmental, economic and political impacts. The election of President Trump presented a major change in the direction of US energy and environmental policy with significant national, state and international effects. To effectively grapple with these issues, students will first gain a general knowledge of the primary energy sources and environmental impacts of national and world wide energy production through a survey format. Topics will include environmental, political and geo-political impacts of oil and gas exploration and production, the mining and production of "rare earth minerals", coal fired generation, solar, wind and nuclear power. The course will then transition into the development of a basic knowledge of the legal and administrative structure of Federal and Texas energy and environmental law.  Using the historical background of domestic and foreign energy development and environmental success, failure, disasters and crisis, we will analyze the issues, conflicts and litigation certain to follow the Trump administration policy changes. The course will also focus on the primary energy sources utilized in Texas and specifically analyze the causes, impacts and resulting policy changes of the winter storm of 2021. Students will have an opportunity to utilize the Texas regulatory and legal structure to develop a knowledge of the basic framework of State authority and the conflicts and interplay between State and Federal law. The course is designed to be flexible enough to evaluate current topics such as the issues involved in the impending litigation over the repeals of the "Endangerment Finding" and the "California Waiver" under the Clean Air Act. Time permitting, the course will focus on various specific energy development projects, with some emphasis on Texas and the Gulf Coast, to gain a practical understanding of the legal and administrative processes involved in dealing with environmental consequences of energy production and delivery. Finally, we will delve into the myriad foreign policy issues and conflicts involved in energy production and climate change policies.  Students will complete the semester by writing and presenting a seminar paper.

Herman Melville

This seminar examines the work of Herman Melville against the institutional, doctrinal, and jurisprudential landscape of nineteenth-century United States law. Melville wrote during a period of rapid industrialization, expanding federal authority, transformation of commercial and maritime law, and intensifying sectional conflict over slavery and sovereignty—a period in which the meaning of law itself was deeply contested. His fiction does not merely reflect this landscape; it probes it, often with greater analytic precision and moral candor than the legal texts of his day. His work persistently engages questions of authority, obligation, personhood, property, contract, and judgment while subjecting those categories to pressures that formal legal reasoning tends to suppress or displace.

We will read major works including "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno," "Billy Budd," The Confidence-Man, selections from Moby-Dick, and selected poems, alongside contemporaneous judicial opinions, statutes, and legal treatises addressing admiralty, commercial law, master–servant relations, slavery, martial law, and the emerging bureaucratic state. Particular attention will be given to the formal and rhetorical affinities between literary narrative and legal reasoning: evidentiary uncertainty, interpretive authority, jurisdictional conflict, and the problem of equitable judgment.

In addition to primary legal materials, we will engage foundational and contemporary law-and-literature scholarship across its main methodological strands—"law in literature," "law as literature," and more recent work attentive to race, gender, and institutional violence. Scholars including Robert Cover, Brook Thomas, Gregg Crane, and Wai Chee Dimock will anchor our theoretical discussions. The goal is not merely to illuminate Melville through law, or law through Melville, but to use the encounter between them to think more carefully about interpretation, authority, judgment, and the limits of institutional reason.

The seminar emphasizes close reading of literary and legal texts alike and sustained discussion. It is designed for students interested in American jurisprudence, literature, and legal history, and interdisciplinary legal theory. Requirements include active participation and a substantial research paper.

This seminar will be a study of philosophical questions concerning punishment and responsibility in the criminal law. These questions include the nature of punishment, its justification, proportionality,  the compatibility of criminal responsibility with a scientific world view, and the compatibility of mens rea as a condition of criminality with deterrence as an aim of punishment.

Respect for precedent is a cornerstone of the U.S. legal system. But the details about how precedent works—and how advocates and judges use it to persuade each other—don’t always receive focused attention. 

This seminar will explore the nature of precedent from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In the first part of the course, we will consider theoretical questions about the nature of precedent: Why have a system of precedent? What exactly is precedent? And how does it bind future decisionmakers (…or does it)? In the second part of the course, we’ll take a more practical approach, reading briefs and judicial decisions to see how advocates and judges invoke precedent to justify their positions and persuade others that their views of the law are correct.  

Evaluation will be based on class participation and a final paper. 

The purpose of this course is to expose students to the evolution of information warfare, from the 1700s to current day. The course will examine key regulations, including the First Amendment and Section 230, the utilization of propaganda campaigns, the psychology behind how they work, and the historical implications. The course will then look at the advent of social media and algorithmic optimization to facilitate and accelerate the reach and impact. Finally, students will discuss where this will lead in the coming years and explore potential policy solutions across intelligence tools and strengthening critical thinking, as well as the legal implications including privacy laws, internet regulations, and national security implications. Please note that this is a writing seminar, with the final project being a paper between 30-50 pages long.