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Contracts
Course Law 101-103 (Day Section)
Course Law 101-201 (Evening Section)
Professor Evans
Fall 2007
Syllabus
Course Purpose: This course is designed to provide first-year law students with several fundamental skills
needed by law students and legal practitioners, including how to read and analyze cases; how to identify,
sort, and work with facts; how to identify legal rules; how to synthesize legal materials; how to think
critically about the law; how to respond to and make legal arguments; how to engage in oral advocacy; and
how to write “like a lawyer,” in an organized and structured manner. This course also is designed to
provide law students with a basic understanding of the substantive law of Contracts in the United States.
Regardless of where and how lawyers practice, they encounter Contracts law. Contracts figure prominently
in local, national, and international commerce between business entities. Contracts also are a staple of
consumer law: click-through agreements on the Internet, residential leases, contracts for the sale of real
estate, rental car agreements, the tiny print on the back of an airline ticket, etc. Contracts also figure in the
business of law itself. Retainer agreements between lawyers and clients are contracts, as are the settlement
agreements that resolve most civil litigation outside of court, and the agreements between lawyers and their
employers. Even criminal law involves Contracts law: plea bargain agreements, for example, are contracts.
This course deals with how contracts are formed, which contracts are valid, when a contract has been
breached, defenses to contractual liability, the various remedies for breach, and quasi-contractual theories of
liability based on detrimental reliance and unjust enrichment. This course also is designed to introduce the
student to legal methodology and the techniques of statutory interpretation.
Class Times: The day section of this course will meet Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:30 p.m. to 3:4