1L - First Year Lesson Topics

Images of the Law Coloring Book

Studying the law can be stressful. CALI® has spent over 40 years making the process easier for law students by creating more than 1000 interactive legal tutorials. These CALI Lessons are written by law faculty and cover more than 40 different legal subject areas. Within many of the lessons, there are original drawings by the artist Eric Molinsky used to illustrate concepts, aid visual learners, or enliven the presentation.

First Amendment: Cases, Controversies, and Contexts

This Casebook (Second Edition, December 2019) is intended to be used in an upper-division course covering the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Its 14 chapters are substantially the same length, with the exception of Chapter One, the introduction, and Chapters Eleven and Twelve which in combination are the usual length. It is intended for 13 or 14 week semester that meets once or twice per week. Each Chapter contains a “Chapter Outline” at the beginning for ease of reference.

Sources of American Law: An Introduction to Legal Research

At its most basic definition the practice of law comprises conducting research to find relevant rules of law and then applying those rules to the specific set of circumstances faced by a client. However, in American law, the legal rules to be applied derive from myriad sources, complicating the process and making legal research different from other sorts of research. This text introduces first-year law students to the new kind of research required to study and to practice law. It seeks to demystify the art of legal research by following a “Source and Process” approach.

What Color is Your C.F.R.?

What Color is Your C.F.R.? is  a problem-based law workbook with a colorful twist. Conceived and written by law librarians, it uses easy to understand plain language and is a light-hearted but helpful supplement to instruction on basic legal research. The book takes a non-traditional approach to legal research and uses short legal research exercises and coloring. 
 

26 Pages in PDF

Published August 2016

Torts: Cases, Principles, and Institutions

This is the Sixth Edition of Torts: Cases, Principles, and Institutions, a casebook for a one-semester torts course that carves out a distinctive niche in the field by focusing on the institutions and sociology of American tort law. The book retains many of the familiar features of the traditional casebook, including many of the classic cases. Like the best casebooks, it seeks to survey the theoretical principles underlying those cases.

The Story of Contract Law: Formation

This book, revised as the Fourth Edition June 2021, is designed to teach contract doctrine beginning with the most fundamental concepts and building on these until the structure of contract doctrine as coherent and cohesive regulation appears. The order of presentation is, in fact, the order in which contract doctrine developed historically, but it is also, in general, the order in which arguments are introduced in litigation.

The Foundational Documents of the American Legal System

This is a collection of documents that have formed the foundation of the American legal system. 

  • Magna Carta (1215)
  • Mayflower Compact (1620)
  • The Declaration of Independence (1776)
  • The Articles of Confederation (1777)
  • The Treaty of Paris (1783)
  • The Northwest Ordinance of 1787
  • The Consitution of the United States (1787)
  • The Bill of Rights (1791)

The translations and text of these documents came from http://www.ourdocuments.gov/

Property Volume 1

This is Volume 1 of a two volume set written for Property Law. From the Preface: Property, as a vaguely defined collection of contract, tort, and criminal cases, does not take on the natural structure of a substantive area of the law through the systematic study of duty, breach, causation, defenses, and damages. Instead this textbook and most Property courses survey various topics in law with two goals in mind. First, we will study a number of traditional property topics, those where the issue of "ownership" and what that entails have long been thought to be a central issue.

Property Volume 2

 This is Volume 2 of a two volume set written for Property Law. From the Preface to Volume 1: Property, as a vaguely defined collection of contract, tort, and criminal cases, does not take on the natural structure of a substantive area of the law through the systematic study of duty, breach, causation, defenses, and damages. Instead this textbook and most Property courses survey various topics in law with two goals in mind. First, we will study a number of traditional property topics, those where the issue of "ownership" and what that entails have long been thought to be a central issue.

Pages