Criminal Law Spring 2025-Holland
Criminal Law Spring 2025-Holland
Welcome to criminal law! I look forward to working with all of you. We teach criminal law in your first year of law school because it is a foundational subject in the law, is tested heavily on the bar exam, explores critical issues in jurisprudence and society, and develops important skills in statutory analysis, legal writing, and advocacy. We will work hard in this course, but we hopefully also will have interesting discussions that will help to propel you along the steep learning curve of legal education.
You are required to register for an “on-call” group under “people” here on Lexis. Each group will have a maximum of 16 students, and these groups will guide the dates when you are eligible for me to call on you in class that day. This system will permit us still to experience the on-call incentives for class preparation, but with some enhanced predictability for your schedules. With this enhanced predictability, however, I also will maintain greater expectation for on-call students to prepare on their dates. Students should register by the time of our first class on January 21, 2025. We will not use the on-call system for this first class. Lexis will auto-register students who have not yet registered by our first class session.
Note: Will will not have any on-call system for our class session on sex crimes, which will take place after the midterm and spring break. Please see the syllabus and Lexis module plan for more details about how we will cover this subject in class.
I already have posted reading and group assignments through module 3 in late February. This schedule is a prediction, because we changed the academic calendar this year to include fewer but longer class sessions. I therefore have left two class session open prior to the midterm in case we pace a little more slowly. If we remain on track to this predicted schedule, I will post reading and group assignments for these two dates at least two weeks in advance.
For more detailed information about this course, and its learning objectives, assessments, grading, and other information, please see the attached syllabus:
Holland Office Hours—Tuesdays and Thursdays 10:00am to 1:00pm, and by appointment: Zoom Link and Calendly appointments. For other meeting times, please email me directly.
Student Teaching Assistant: Nikki Bogacz
TWEN-CALI Exercises: If you want access to CALI exercises for criminal law during the semester, you can register for theTWEN site for this course. This TWEN site contains the full bank of CALI exercises for criminal law, but no other materials. Good practice!