Photograph: Students in a classroom.

Upper-Level Electives

Recommended Foundation Courses

The faculty strongly encourages enrollment in the following foundation courses. These courses are foundations for other advanced electives and are considered part of the core of a well-rounded legal education. Students are urged to enroll in these courses, along with the required courses in Civil Procedure II, Constitutional Law II, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, and Professional Responsibility, in the second year of law study. Enrolling in these courses in the second year will not only lay the foundation for more advanced courses in the third year, but also result in fewer conflicts in scheduling classes and exams in both the second and third years.

  • Administrative Law
  • Business Associations
  • Commercial Law
  • Decedents' Estates and Trusts
  • Family Law
  • Pretrial Advocacy - Civil
  • Pretrial Advocacy - Criminal
  • Public International Law
  • Real Estate Transactions
  • Taxation of Individual Income

Additional Course Suggestions

The following additional courses are not as universally considered a part of the core curriculum, but they are nevertheless important classes for many students, as described below. They are also commonly tested on state bar examinations. Thus, while these are not classes that all students would typically take, they are classes to which students should give careful consideration in planning their upper level curriculum. Remedies and Conflict of Laws are courses best studied in the third year of law school. The others are feasible in either the second or third year.

Advanced Legal Research

Although this is not a Bar-tested course, all students would benefit from taking Advanced Legal Research.

Conflict of Laws

The heart of the Conflicts class is the problem of choosing the law to apply to a transaction or occurrence that crosses state lines. Many transactions or occurrences are entirely local. Often, when a transaction or occurrence touches more than one state, the laws of the involved states happen to be in agreement. But a growing number of multistate transactions or occurrences involve conflicts between the potentially applicable laws. When this happens, the resulting problems are often quite difficult to resolve. For students who may engage in a practice representing clients involved in activities on a multi-state or multinational basis, Conflict of Laws can be a very important class.

Payment Systems

This class often appears on bar exam subject lists as Commercial Paper of Negotiable Instruments. It covers Uniform Commercial Code articles 3, 4, and 5, concerning negotiable instruments, bank deposits and collections, regulation of other payment devices such as credit cards and electronic fund transfers, and letters of credit.

Remedies

Although the Remedies class looks at legal, equitable and restitutionary remedies, the most important reason to take the class is that it is the only opportunity in law school to obtain a broad exposure to equity practice and the underlying doctrines of equity that apply to equitable remedies such as injunctions and specific performance.

Prerequisites

One factor students should consider in course selection is whether a desired course requires a prerequisite course. Prerequisites are listed at the end of each course description.

Bar Examination Subjects

Each state determines the subjects to be tested on its bar examination. Students should not feel compelled to enroll in every course tested on a bar examination, but for the student who plans to practice law, bar examination subjects should be a factor in course selection. Information about subjects tested by each state is available in our Professional Development Office, in the bar exam section of this website (for Kansas), and online at www.barbri.com.

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