/ What’s What Law Student Handbook/Graduation Requirements

Prior to Fall 2008

To graduate from Lewis & Clark Law School with a Juris Doctor, JD degree, a student must take or do the following:

Also see Requirements Applicable to All JD Candidates.

Required Courses

Civil Procedure I & II
Constitutional Law I & II
Contracts I & II
Criminal Procedure I
Legal Analysis and Writing I & II
Property
Torts I

Complete one seminar course

Complete the Professionalism Requirement

Professional Skills Requirement

Complete two writing requirements: A and B or WIE and Capestone.

Complete a minimum of 86 semester hours of which 72 are graded and/or required. For purposes of this requirement, the ungraded credits of an externship shall be considered a graded course.

Complete 65 semester hours of course work in classes with regularly scheduled class time (for this calculation, externships are not included, but clinic classes where students are supervised by clinical faculty who are full-time employees of the law school, and whose primary occupation is teaching clinic, does count toward the hours).

Professionalism Requirement

To be eligible for a JD degree, a student must have earned credit in a course or courses which provide instruction in the duties and responsibilities of the legal profession. The Dean, after consulting with the Curriculum Committee, shall designate the courses which satisfy this requirement.

The Curriculum Committee has approved the following options to satisfy the professionalism requirement:

Regulation of Attorneys and Ethics course.
Lewis & Clark Legal Clinic (civil litigation), no other clinic meets the requirement.

Seminar Requirement

Each student must successfully complete a seminar prior to graduation. Seminars are designed as small discussion classes with:

Enrollment limited to no more than 20 students
Class meetings to be conducted in a discussion format with an emphasis on cooperative learning and shared knowledge; and
Course substance to allow for in-depth discussion and study of specialized problems, thus being clearly distinguished from courses which seek to survey a substantive area of the law. Courses that qualify as a seminar are officially designated by the Curriculum Committee, and will have the word “seminar” in the title, and will include in the course description any enrollment cap lower than 20 students that has been approved by the Curriculum Committee. The Externship seminars may not be used to fulfill this requirement.

Professional Skills Requirement

Each student must take a minimum of 2 credit hours in a class from the list approved by the faculty as meeting the professional skills requirement. For a current list, see the graduation requirements.

Writing Requirements (entering prior Fall 2008)

Students entering prior to Fall 2008 may also meet the graduation requirement by doing the WIE and Capstone projects described on the Graduation Requirements pages for students entering after Fall 2008.

Each student must successfully complete the writing requirement prior to graduation. This requirement has two components, hereafter referred to as writing requirement “A” and writing requirement “B”.

Writing requirements will not be considered complete without the submission of the proper writing requirement form, which is available in the Registrar’s office and on the website, under Important Forms. Proper forms for the writing requirement should be submitted to the Registrars office during the semester the work is undertaken. When the grade for the paper is submitted, the Registrar will check with the faculty adviser to confirm that the writing requirement has been fulfilled. Confirmation cannot be done unless the form has been submitted. Students are advised to begin fulfilling this requirement prior to the last semester in law school.

Writing Requirement Criteria

To satisfy both writing requirements, a paper must meet all of the following requirements:

Must be a significant research, analytical or drafting paper and cannot be a mere report on the law;
Be graded by a faculty member and receive a minimum grade of “C”. If the paper is not graded, but fills the criteria below, the faculty member must certify to the Registrar that the paper would, if graded, receive at least a “C”;
Meet, at a minimum, the following criteria: a) Acceptable organization and writing style; and b) Demonstration of articulate, thoughtful, and well-structured analysis of the subject matter, based on a careful and competent research.

The “A” or “B” writing requirement may be satisfied by any one of the following if the paper meets the criteria set out in the previous paragraphs:

A paper written for a seminar or class;
Individual research (for a minimum of two semester hours per individual research topic);
An extensive trial memorandum or appellate brief written in conjunction with Clinic (for a minimum of four semester hours);
A paper written to fulfill the paper component of the Externship requirement.

Any paper written outside of class, seminar or individual research as described above, requires approval from a full-time faculty member, as opposed to an adjunct faculty member, before writing requirement credit will be given. One may not seek certification of writing requirement completion if certification has been requested of and denied by another professor. No one paper may be used to satisfy both the “A” and “B” writing requirement.

“A” Writing Requirement

In addition to the previous page, the “A” writing requirement must:

Involve a mandatory rewrite after a draft has been reviewed and commented upon by the faculty member grading the paper; the final paper must be reasonably responsive to the commentary and criticism received:
Cannot be written for an adjunct faculty member without prior approval of the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

“B” Writing Requirement

In addition to the general writing requirement criteria above, the “B” writing requirement, at the discretion of the supervising faculty member:

May be met by a series of papers written for a seminar or class;
May be a brief drafted by a student in a school-sponsored moot court competition;
Need not involve a mandatory rewrite:
May be co-authored

One Paper for Credit in More Than One Class

On occasion, a student may wish to use one paper to satisfy two requirements or two classes. The following rules apply:

If all applicable criteria are met, a student may use one paper to satisfy a class and one or more non-credit requirement (e.g. class and “A” or “B” paper; class and certificate paper; class and “A” or “B” paper certificate paper).
Use of one paper to get credit for more than one class (including a class and law review) for which the student is concurrently enrolled is permitted only as follows:

a) The student must disclose the intention to use one paper to satisfy more than one class to all professors involved. Failure to make such a disclosure is an honor code violation.

b) The finished paper must be worth the total credit of the two classes (e.g. a 2 credit seminar and another 2 credit class equals a 4 credit paper).

c) The student must prepare a written petition outlining the intent and understanding of the paper’s credit equivalent, and the petition must have the written approval of both supervising instructors.

d) The student must submit the completed and signed petition to the Registrar’s Office to be placed in the student file as a safeguard against a charge of academic impropriety.

3. A student who has earned credit in one class based on a submitted paper and wishes to expand that paper for a later class, must have the written approval of the subsequent professor.