Teaching the Law School Curriculum - Institute for Law Teaching ...

• Remedies, particularly the availability of specific performance.
• Scope of the duty of good faith.
• Pre-contractual liability.
• Frustration and economic hardship excusing performance.
• Revocation of offers and options.
• Statute of frauds.
• Contract formation: battle of the forms.
• Parol Evidence Rule.
• Fundamental breach and the perfect tender rule.
• Limitation to consequential damages (i.e., the rule in Hadley v. Baxendale).
Contracts 133
At the end of the course, I present the students with a lengthy fact pattern that I ask them to work through in
class assuming a variety of applicable substantive contract law, ranging from U.S. to the CISG, UINDROIT, and
even discrete elements of foreign law.
My experiences have made me a partisan of anchoring certain notions of international law within the 1L curriculum.
Contracts appears to be a particularly fertile course for such an endeavor. Looking beyond the substantive
contract law learned, this integration leaves 1Ls with: (1) a broader sense of the importance of international
legal materials; (2) an understanding that other nations may have legal systems that are different from the
U.S. system (in certain cases this can constitute a basis to learn how to improve our own system); (3) familiarity
with the differences between comparative law and international law (and how international law can alleviate
the uncertainty and confusion which may arise when contracting parties rely on foreign law to resolve disputes);
(4) basic exposure to the role of United Nations committees as well as the treaty-making process; and (5) early
exposure to the role of arbitration as a tool of alternative dispute resolution.
Should anyone be interested in the materials and cases relied upon to introduce these international legal
regimes in specific areas of contract law, please contact me. These shall form part of a casebook presently under
contract with the West Publishing Group. Perhaps of assistance is a CLE paper I have prepared on international
contract law, available on my home page (http://home.wlu.edu/~drumblm).
Mark A. Drumbl, Washington and Lee University School of Law
Getting to Know Students and Involving Them in Class Pedagogy
I follow the example of many faculty in handing out a questionnaire in the first week of class to help me
(1) become familiar with the expertise and experiences that students bring to class, (2) learn about and perhaps
respond to their learning styles, to the extent that they are aware of how they best learn, and (3) schedule
office hours convenient to the students’ academic and personal schedules. Typical questions or prompts on the
questionnaire [with my comments about the questionnaire] include the following:
1. Please summarize any professional or personal experiences or characteristics that may be relevant to your
study of law and more particularly to your studies in this course. Tell me whether I have your permission to
call on you in class to share your experience when it might advance class discussion.
[Entry #1 shows students that I value them, their experiences, and their contributions to class discussion.
It sometimes provides a basis for calling on a student in class to share a particularly interesting and relevant
story. I also try to find the time to type up a one-page collection of one-liners that present one interesting
fact about each student. One year, I distributed the collection without revealing the name of each
student described. I asked the class to determine the identity of the student associated with each description
before the end of the semester. Sometimes I’ll also spend a few minutes in the first class dividing the students
into pairs, so that each can interview the other to get a brief picture of the other student’s background and