This designation enables the offering of new courses covering emerging legal and practice trends and areas of special interest to students and faculty, as well as permitting development of courses with potential for integration into the ongoing curriculum. TIL courses offered over the last several years include the following:

Advanced Environmental Law: Environmental Law and International Development

This course will explore selected issues in environmental law and policy, with an emphasis on the links between environmental quality and international development in the current era of globalization. Two case studies in domestic environmental law (asbestos disease and hazardous waste disposal) will be used as a jumping off point to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the two major types of environmental law: government regulation and civil justice (tort) litigation. We will then examine emerging international law in the field of sustainable development and transnational litigation (efforts by foreign citizens to sue U.S.U.S. courts for injuries arising out of their operations abroad). Other topics include corporate codes of conduct; oil exploration and production in the territories of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Rainforest; and global warming. Students will be evaluated based on class participation and a 20-30 page paper. No prerequisites are required.

Anti-Discrimination Theory: Paradigmatic Challenges to Race-Based Discrimination

The course covers, in depth, discrete issues on anti-discrimination doctrine in the post-Civil Rights Act era, drawing on anti-discrimination theory, which recasts legal doctrinal approaches to include ethnic, language, and national origin-based experientalist constructs.

The course reviews critical race and critical race feminisim scholarship. Students will critique theoretical approaches to race, ethnic and gender based antisubordination and antidiscrimination litigation. In the course students will discuss current and emerging social justice issues, including educational access, affirmative action and fiscal equity; domestic violence and access to services for women of color, including immigrant women; racialized sexual harassment; LGBT issues within communities of color; and race and ethnic-based law enforcment. Students write an independent paper based on an original topic selected by the student.

Civil Pre-Trial Process

Focusing on federal pretrial process - emphasizing motions, motion practice, and pleadings - students consider an overview of the pre-trial process and a more in-depth examination of such areas as complaints, answers, class actions, preliminary injunctions, motions to dismiss, and summary judgment motions. Choosing an appropriate federal case, subject to instructor approval, students assemble a case file and write a paper detailing the course of the case, concentrating on one or more of the important motions made in it. The final course project - designed to enable understanding of the implications of these processes grounded in a substantive context - requires students to choose, assemble, and analyze the record of a recent federal case.

Computer Applications in the Practice of Law

Computer technology has changed the way law is practiced and introduced essential new lawyering skills and ethical dimensions across all practice areas - from solo practice to complex litigation. This survey of the major computer technologies used by the legal profession teaches through hands-on use of these emerging technologies, including web tools, spread-sheets, databases, case management and practice support software, litigation support, automated document assembly, presentation software, electronic publishing, and collaborative tools.

Disability Law

How does American law affect people with mental and physical disabilities? A significant portion of this course is devoted to examining federal disability discrimination law governing access to employment, public accommodations, public services, and insurance. Additional topics include federal income support programs for people with disabilities, the legal standards governing involuntary institutionalization and treatment of people with mental illness, and the special professional responsibility issues implicated in the representation of the disabled. As background for exploring these laws, students examine alternative theories on the nature of disability and the responsibility of society toward people with disabilities, and how disability laws in the U.S. compare with those of other countries.

Education Law/Rights of Children

This two-hour doctrinal course, meeting once weekly, covers the right to an education, student privacy rights, student suspension rights, special education rights, and financing urban education.

Engaging Urban Bureaucracies Through Law

This course, designed to build the skills and understanding critical to effective lawyering in, and interaction with, governmental agencies, includes discussions of the theory of bureaucracy, sociology of complex organizations, case studies of the NYC public education system, community organizing skills, and strategic skills for effecting bureaucratic change from within and without. Students learn problem-solving, balancing and combining adversarial and non-adversarial interventions, strategies for "expanding the pie," negotiation, benevolent co-optation, and techniques for minimizing institutional defensiveness.

Financial Concepts for Practice

Co-taught by a CPA who runs an accounting firm and a CUNY graduate who founded and manages a small law firm, the course provides an introduction to the business principles necessary to open and run a small firm. The course, also useful for those who will represent and advise small businesses, introduces the basic principles of accounting, including the Fundamental Accounting Equation, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, the balance sheet, the income statement, and cash flow statements. As students build a financial and accounting system for a simulated small firm, they wrestle with the ins and outs of IRS requirements, audit issues, business and employment taxes, applying for business loans, choosing and using accounting software, and financial planning.

Immigration and Citizenship Law

This course covers immigration and citizenship, citizenship by birth and naturalization, dual nationality, family-based immigration issues (including domestic violence and sexual orientation), employment-based immigration issues, refugees and asylees, legalization, exclusion, and deportation (including post-9/11 restrictions and proposals), focusing all the while on the underlying race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation themes of immigration and citizenship laws.

International and Domestic Refugee and Asylum Law

Starting with an understanding of the current flow of refugees around the world and into the United States, this course examines the international law underpinnings of the standard for protection of refugees and how that international norm has been interpreted and applied in various countries. Using international law documents, national legislation, and U.S. domestic asylum law, students explore how the human rights implications entailed in assuring the rights and protection needs and concerns of refugees are met as well as the international obligations on countries to do so.

Women and Crime

Focus on women as offenders, victims, and "professional" participants (including attorneys and judges) in the criminal justice system provides a lens for examining issues of gender equality, as well as criminal responsibility, deterrence, and punishment. Reading cases and articles providing context and theoretical perspectives, students explore topics that include women in prison, women who kill, women and the death penalty, women and "victimless crimes," sex crimes, and women as victims of violence.

Work and the Law

The relationship between employer and employee is complex and crucially important. This course examines the law regulating the relationship, from the time an employer considers hiring new employees until they leave the workforce under the protection of the age discrimination, retirement security, and health laws. Issues addressed include permissible pre-hire inquiries, the viability of hiring foreign nationals, wages, hours, leaves, substance abuse, performance evaluations, investigating misconduct (including harassment), discrimination, privacy, violence, union organizing, safety benefits, record keeping, and terminations.

Workplace Health and Safety

What are the laws and legal strategies intended to protect health and safety in the workplace? This course offers a basic introduction to the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) and related laws, right-to-know laws and laws offering protection against retaliation, workers’ compensation and tort litigation for work-related injuries and diseases, and selected current issues and initiatives in workplace health and safety. Case studies of workplace conditions and injury provide an opportunity for understanding and developing a critical perspective on this highly-regulated area.