Harvard Revamps 1L Curriculum

Harvard Law School has approved the biggest revamping of its 1L curriculum in over 100 years:

The changes seek to ensure:

• greater attention to statutes and regulations;
• introduction to the institutions and processes of public law;
• systematic attention to international and comparative law and economic systems;
• opportunities for students to address alone and in teams complex, fact-intensive problems as they arise in the world (rather than digested into legal doctrines in appellate opinions) and to generate and evaluate solutions through private ordering, regulation, litigation and other strategies;
• more sustained occasions to reflect on the entire enterprise of law and legal studies, the assumptions and methods of contemporary U.S. law and the perspectives provided by other disciplines, and to develop a common fund of ideas and approaches relevant to designing effective and just laws and institutions.

To pursue these goals, the law school will add three new course requirements to the first-year curriculum:

• A new course focusing on legislation and regulation;
• Each student will take one of three specially crafted courses introducing global legal systems and concerns - Public International Law, International Economic Law, and Comparative Law;
• A new course, Problems and Theories, will focus on problem solving, while introducing students to theoretical frameworks illuminating legal doctrines and institutions

For more details and press coverage, see:

• Boston Globe
• Harvard Crimson
• Harvard Law Bulletin
• New York Times