The First Year: Rigorous, Stimulating, Collegial

The courses you’re required to take during the first year of law school at Michigan — Property, Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, and Legal Practice — provide the essential foundation for the study and practice of law. In these courses, primarily taught by our tenured faculty, you’ll begin to develop a deep critical skepticism and the ability to assess a problem from multiple perspectives. Professors use the Socratic method, or variations thereof, to engage and challenge you to think critically and creatively about the issue at hand. By the end of the first year, you and your classmates will have internalized what we call “sympathetic engagement with counter-argument”: the ability to formulate an argument and then explore and understand the best arguments against it.

Also during the first year, students take an academic elective. One popular option is to take advantage of the rich interdisciplinary offerings at Michigan and choose a course that will examine law through another discipline’s perspective. Another is to enroll in a seminar allowing more in-depth study of a particular topic. Students may also use their first-year elective to complete the sole remaining required course, Transnational Law.