Family Law Capstone – 6413

This capstone course is designed to expose students seriousabout a career in family law to the ways in which family law concepts areimplemented practically and procedurally. Accordingly, while the course will touch on traditional family lawtopics such as premarital agreements, custody, property divisions, and othertopics, it will do so in the contexts that attorneys are likely to encounterthese topics in practice.  The coursewill accordingly focus on interviewing potential clients, retaining and usingexperts, incorporating financial planners and therapists in family disputeresolution, conducting a mediation, and drafting documents such as cohabitationagreements, divorce petitions, settlement decrees, and parenting plans.  The assignments in the course will be designedboth to prepare students for practice and to capture the way that family lawpractice is changing to deal with the realities of modern families. The course willoffer rigorous practical experience and advancedtheoretical and policy discussion taught by a family law academic who doessignificant scholarship in the most cutting-edge of areas of current family lawpractice and a practicing attorney with a sophisticated practice and manyunique cases from which to draw teaching examples and exercises.  In ourcourse, both roles -- the academic and the practitioner -- will come together for a unique educational offering for students who want to explore family law at its most interesting and complex.