Mini Seminars

One of the hallmarks of being a student at Michigan Law is the unusual level of access to and interaction with professors. The mini-seminar program takes that experience to a whole new level: If you thought you knew your favorite professors before, consider the insights you'll have after you've had dinner at their houses while their children run around in diapers. And for the reserved student who has avoided more than cursory visits to office hours, the mini-seminar presents the perfect opportunity to take advantage of one of the most special features of our community.

Implemented in 2005, the program has proved enormously popular with students and faculty alike. The mini-seminars capitalize on both the Law School's unique physical environment, where most faculty live within a stone's throw of the Quadrangle, and our ethos of collegiality, to provide a new venue for personal connections between students and faculty in a casual forum. For one ungraded credit, groups of 10 or 12 students meet with a professor (or two) over the course of a semester (or in some cases, the entire academic year) to hold provocative conversations in a series of two-hour sessions in the professor's home or some other non-classroom setting. The seminar's theme is faculty-selected—often intensively law-focused, balanced by a handful of topics that might be described as marginally legal. About 15 mini-seminars are offered each year.

For 2012-13, the topics are:

Fall
Does the Outcome of the Presidential Election Matter? (Prof. Michael Barr)
Human Trafficking in the Media (Prof. Bridgette Carr)
Law, Medicine, and Ethics (Prof. John Pottow)
Local Government, Labor, and Education Policy: The Michigan Emergency Manager Law (Prof. Sam Bagenstos)

Winter
Animal Law (Prof. Nicole Appleberry)
International Law and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Prof. Steve Ratner)
Jail and Prison Conditions (Prof. Margo Schlanger)
Outside the Record: The Stories Behind Child Welfare Appeals (Prof. Vivek Sankaran)
Revenge (Prof. Scott Hershovitz)
Those Seductive Criminals (Prof. Don Herzog)

Year-Round
Constitutional Chestnuts (Prof. Julian Davis Mortenson)
Hollywood, Bollywood, and the Law (Prof. Vic Khanna)
An Insider's View of a Supreme Court Case (Prof. Rich Friedman & Prof. David Moran)
Reading the Michigan Law Faculty (Prof. Gil Seinfeld)
The Stories Behind the Supreme Court Cases (Prof. Beth Wilensky)
What Not To Wear (Prof. Nancy Vettorello)