Academic

Landmark Transactions

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

In my continuing quest to advance the study of transactional lawyering, I have been thinking about course materials for transactional courses. 

If you think about creating transactional courses that have analogs in the traditional, litigation-oriented curriculum, you observe that the first moves into transactional lawyering were made in the so-called "skills courses," such as contract drafting and business planning. These courses bear a strong methodological resemblance to traditional legal writing and advocacy courses, respectively. 

More recent innovations in transactional teaching, including most Deals courses, have a fair bit of theory. 

What I haven't seen are transactional courses modeled on traditional doctrinal courses, with important contracts as the primary course materials. Most law school casebooks feature excerpts of important cases, which reveal the tensions in legal doctrines or push doctrines in one direction or another. Has anyone attempted to compile of book of landmark contracts?

Some casebooks, including my Business Organizations casebook, include case studies, but these case studies focus on illustrative transactions, not landmark transactions. Would it be useful to create a casebook featuring landmark transactions? How would the book be organized? What transactions would you think to include?

Full post as published by Conglomerate on August 16, 2010 (boomark / email).