1L - First Year Lesson Topics

The purpose of this exercise is to help students—especially first-year students—understand the process of legal analysis and improve their legal writing and legal analysis skills. Specifically, students will work on their ability to apply the law to the facts of a problem.

This lesson is about Legal Encyclopedias in print format. As one of the main types of secondary resources for legal research, Legal Encyclopedias can be useful for a variety of basic legal research tasks. This lesson will give you an overview of legal encyclopedias, explain how they are used in legal research, and run through a couple of hypotheticals. The lesson focuses on one of the two legal encyclopedias covering American Law in general - American Jurisprudence 2d (Am. Jur. 2d) - and gives some examples of state legal encyclopedias.

Choosing the most appropriate sources for your research need is a crucial part of of research strategy. Differentiating between free or fee-based electronic legal research sources is important for efficient and cost-effective research, as is recognizing when it is beneficial to use print legal research sources.

This lesson is designed to help law students develop their abilities to handle legal research assignments. Students who have some experience doing legal research or who have completed their first year legal research course will benefit the most. Legal Research Methodology may also be used to supplement the learning process for students studying legal research for the first time.

This lesson looks at formal preliminary agreements, often titled letters of intent or memorandums of understanding.

This lesson deals with liability for defectively designed products and products that are defective because of an inadequate warning. It does not consider liability for defectively manufactured products, which are dealt with in the lesson Liability for Defectively Manufactured Products. It begins by comparing the two predominant tests for determining whether a product is defectively designed (the consumer expectations test and the risk/utility test), then considers the impact of warnings, including a consideration of the learned intermediary doctrine.

This lesson deals with liability for defectively manufactured products. It does not consider liability for defectively designed products, or products that are defective because of an inadequate warning, which are dealt with in the lesson Liability for Defectively Designed Products.

One of the difficult common law issues in defamation was the distinction between libel and slander. This lesson explains the differences between the two types of defamatory statements. Material is provided on the damage requirements of both. This lesson is part of a series about defamation. One should review the lesson on Basic Issues in Defamation and Privileges before working with this exercise. After finishing this one, the exercise on Constitutional Issues in Defamation should be covered.

This lesson examines the law of licenses, specifically as that law intersects the law of easements. The Lesson first defines licenses and contrasts that definition with the definition of easements. It then explores the circumstances in which a license, normally revocable, becomes irrevocable and explains that an irrevocable license essentially gives the parties the same rights and duties as an easement would.

This lesson will examine the life estate, the shortest freehold estate in land recognized by Anglo-American law.