Family Law Capstone – 6413

This capstone course is designed to expose students serious about a career in family law to the ways in which family law concepts are implemented practically and procedurally.  Accordingly, while the course will touch on traditional family law topics such as premarital agreements, custody, property divisions, and other topics, it will do so in the contexts that attorneys are likely to encounter these topics in practice.  The course will accordingly focus on interviewing potential clients, retaining and using experts, incorporating financial planners and therapists in family dispute resolution, conducting a mediation, and drafting documents such as cohabitation agreements, divorce petitions, settlement decrees, and parenting plans.  The assignments in the course will be designed both to prepare students for practice and to capture the way that family law practice is changing to deal with the realities of modern families. The course will offer rigorous practical experience and advanced theoretical and policy discussion taught by a family law academic who does significant scholarship in the most cutting-edge of areas of current family law practice and a practicing attorney with a sophisticated practice and many unique cases from which to draw teaching examples and exercises.  In our course, 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.