1L - First Year Lesson Topics

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.

Civil Procedure: Pleading

This chapter covers the Civil Procedure topic of Pleading: The Plaintiff’s Complaint. The chapter takes approximately four class periods to cover in detail.

The student is exposed to cases, presented with questions that are designed to both guide class discussion and to help the student focus his reading of the materials, pleadings from cases, and the applicable Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Introduction to Basic Legal Citation

This electronic publication was conceived in the summer of 1992. A small band of Cornell Law students, charged with identifying subjects on which computer-based materials would be particularly helpful, placed citation at the top of the list. With their assistance I prepared the first edition of Introduction to Basic Legal Citation. It was released on diskette that fall, one of the first hypertext publications of Cornell's Legal Information Institute (LII).

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