This course explores the variety of ways in which the law attempts to resolve conflicts among land uses, as well as plan and regulate the impacts of different land use patterns. Topics include common law; state, regional, and local planning; zoning; environmental controls; growth management; historic preservation; restrictions relating to residential development; and constitutional limits on land use regulation. Throughout the course, students will explore how land-use decisions affect environmental quality and how land-use decision making addresses environmental concerns.

In this course, students will examine fundamental issues in real estate transactions, including financing, contracting, and conveyancing, with a primary focus on commercial transactions.

Natural resource management presents extremely difficult and contentious issues of law and public policy. Major debates continue to rage over offshore drilling, the protection for biodiversity, and the management of commercial fisheries. This course provides an overview of the way in which our society allocates and regulates the use of several natural resources, including fisheries, wildlife, wetlands, petroleum, and lands of aesthetic beauty such as Yellowstone or Louisiana’s fabled swamps.

This course examines the distribution of benefits and burdens in environmental protection, particularly as related to race and income. Students will examine facility permitting, risk assessment, administrative processes, anti-discrimination law, constitutional guarantees of civil rights and civil liberties, and community lawyering. Readings will include judicial opinions, law review articles, interdisciplinary materials, and situational case studies. Because southern Louisiana is a hotbed of environmental justice activity, the course will integrate important local issues and disputes.

This course is designed for law students who are interested in teaching inner-city middle school and high school students about law related issues. Twice a week pairs of law students will enter local public school classrooms to discuss legal rights, responsibilities, and practical legal problems. The course also includes a two-hour seminar component and a paper requirement at the end of the semester. Students completing the course earn three hours experiential learning credits and satisfy the Law and Poverty Requirement. 

This course surveys United States constitutional and statutory law regulating naturalization and immigration. Students explore the historical development of that law and the role that racial, national origin, and gender classifications have played in that development. Students are expected to develop an understanding of immigration that reflects awareness of global migration forces and broader policy choices that may be affected by international treaties and conventions. Students are evaluated on the basis of class participation and a written appellate brief. 

This course introduces issues surrounding the provision of reproductive health care, including basic biology principles, the historical regulation of hygiene products for menstruation, contraception, pregnancy, and pregnancy termination; the current legal landscape of pregnancy termination care at the federal and state levels; and the legal challenges to such laws, including the development of shield laws and related issues.

The course covers principally the areas of bank formation and bank regulation. Additional topics include antitrust aspects of banking, the role of the F.D.I.C. and the Federal Reserve, and international banking.

This course deals with unfair competition in the marketplace and considers the remedies competitors may have against one another. Topics include trademarks, trade names, trade identity, unfair competition doctrines of passing off false advertising, misrepresentation, trade libel or disparagement and misappropriation, protection of trade secrets, the right to publicize, and interference with contractual and business relations. Emphasis is placed upon the interrelationship of federal and state regulation with some necessary reference to copyright and patent laws.

This is a seminar devoted to an in-depth treatment of one or more topics in the area of torts, products liability, or relational interests. The exact subjects to be considered will be chosen by the instructor.