Legal Methods & Skills

Overview

Legal Methods and Skills, as its title makes clear, is designed to introduce students to legal craft—specifically, the craft of case-handling.

The course provides students with a staged introduction to case-handling, taking them from the basics of navigation and description, to more advanced skills such as written and oral argument.

In so doing, the course also addresses a key question: what is law? Specifically, is law’s essence to be found in its form, its function(s), its key actors and institutions, in some combination of these, or in some other way?

Learning Objectives

Students will acquire case-handling skills, a key component in successful transition to law school life. Specifically, students will learn how to:

(i) navigate a case;
(ii) describe key elements of a case (facts, issue(s), decision and reason(s)); and
(iii) analyse a case, in both a narrow manner and a broader law-in-context one.

In addition, via the cases with which they engage, students will develop an awareness of the role of law in society. Students will also have a grasp of legal system basics, such as the court structure.

Skills

The course develops two key skills:

(i) case-handling (notably description and analysis). More particularly, the ability to be clear, concise and precise, and to support one’s claims in an appropriate manner, whether orally or using the written word.

(ii) the ability to evaluate the role of law in society, and to do so in a manner that is clear, concise, precise and supported in an appropriate manner.

Assessment

None