Legal Commentary

When I was in law school in the early/mid-1990s, there were two civ pro professors teaching sections of a one-semester, four-hour course. And it was legend that one of them always taught Erie and the other did not. In fact, the failure of the latter to do so was a frequent topic for the annual student revue. A typical skit:

I am becoming that professor (fortunately, we have no student revue that could lampoon me for it--or for anything else). For the second straight time teaching a one-semester, four-hour civ pro class at FIU (not counting my year at SLU, where civ pro is a five-hour course), I will not get to Erie. And this is disappointing, both because I consider it important and it is probably my favorite subject (along with subject matter jurisdiction) in the class. As it stands, I have roughly 10 hours of class time left in which to do a quick subject-matter jurisdiction review, then cover personal jurisdiction and venue.

I honestly have no idea how to remedy this. I am fairly sure that I have cut everything as far down as possible, in terms of time and coverage. We spent only three classes/four hours on Discovery and one class on Rule 11. We spent a lot of time on pleading standards (about 4 classes/5 hours); but that much time is unavoidable as we try to figure out what to do about Twombly and the looming Iqbal and as I have tried to respond to demands for more practical discussions by incorporating sample problems into class discussions. Subject matter jurisdiction probably has taken longer than it should, but again, we need to spend time making heads or tails out of an incomprehensible recent supplemental jurisdiction decision.

Perhaps I am making the wrong choices in the depth v. breadth debate. But it seems to me that coverage of one topic must be sufficient to make it coherent and to give students a sufficient base of knowledge. You can't simply refer to joinder in explaining pleading--you also have to spend some time with the basic joinder rules; you can't teach supplemental jurisdiction without teaching the exception in § 1367(b), which is confusing. Actually, the one time I tried to gloss over joinder, I kept getting questions from students who, armed with Glannon's or some other study guide, wanted to know more than I had planned to cover.

My conclusion is I need five hours (or at least 4 1/2 hours) of civ pro. That pretty clearly is not going to happen, both because of the legal-academic trends and because prawfs in every other 1L subject could tick-off a list similar to mine. So I continue searching for some other solution.