Elon Law professor Howard Katz has published, "Adding Transactional Aspects to Doctrinal Courses Using a Spectrum Approach," in the 2009 special report of Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law.
In the article, Katz writes that one objective of incorporating transactional aspects into a first-year law course is, “putting in the minds of students a competing model of what law school is about. We need to put in the students’ minds the fact that there are real attorneys and that they are going to be one of those real attorneys who do real things in the world.”
Katz encourages law faculty to incorporate transactional aspects into their courses along a spectrum, from asking only a few basic questions, to the insertion of in-class exercises, to a complete graded drafting exercise added to a doctrinal course, depending on faculty members’ views of how extensively transactional aspects ought to be explored in various law classes.
Katz concludes by underscoring the value of adding transactional aspects to law courses, writing, “with some persistence, some vision and some strategy, legal education could be better a year from now than it is today.”
Katz’s presentation was delivered at the Emory Law Center for Transactional Law and Practice 2009 conference entitled, “Teaching Drafting and Transactional Skills: The Basics and Beyond.” It was then edited into a special volume of The Tennessee Journal of Business Law.
Click here to read more about Elon Law professor Howard Katz.