OLDFall 2022 Law School Course Evaluations

to practice unlike Professor Burnstein. I think it is best if professor burnstein teaches an upper level course because this was the general consensus amongst my colleagues. It is very clear that Professor Burstein is extremely brilliant and skilled in her field of patents, as well as a very skilled court attorney, but she showed very little interest in teaching or in fostering our learning of civil procedure. We received half of the in-person class time as any other section, including shortened classes and several "guest speaker" sessions in which little related to civil procedure, in fact the discussions centered around her own experiences as a junior associate. When my peers would email her questions about materials she would routinely refuse to answer, asking students if they had consulted other resources or ASP. She routinely raised her voice at our class, and was disrespectful in the way that she spoke to students when she was frustrated, or when she did not agree with student perspectives. When students tried to reach out to her about her teaching style or to ask for supplemental materials, she developed a powerpoint to explain to us why she does not teach like other professors, instead of taking student criticisms and trying to help us. In class, we repeatedly asked her for past exams, sample exams, sample practice questions, or any materials she had that could help us prepare for her final exam, all of which she said no to, claiming that she did not think they would be beneficial. As a result, our TA volunteered to obtain some practice questions for us, and our entirely class routinely relied on him throughout the semester far more than what was likely expected. She spent about 75% of our class time addressing and explaining patent law, often even stating "I won ' t test you on this but it is good to know," which confused me and led me to have to tune out a lot of what she said so as not to confuse testable material with non testable material. On her rubric for the midterm exam that she was reluctant to let us keep to prepare for the final, she asked us for casebook page numbers in lieu of case citations, which caused great stress among us all to try and remember the pages in the book where all of our concepts had originated. She also refused to give us individual feedback on the mock midterm, which would have been fine had she at least gone over it in class or provided a sample answer, which she also refused to provide when asked. Instead, we were asked to swap papers and assess each other ' s work, though none of us were qualified to assess anyone else ' s essays because we ourselves were the ones taking the exam, unsure if our answers or understanding were even correct. Overall, Professor Burstein is likely an extremely effective upper level professor, where students have already learned how to independently learn and what law school is like. However, for a 1L civil procedure class, I feel extremely unprepared for the final and that our section was put at a great disadvantage compared to other sections because of class time management and a lack of availability/willingness to help us. I think Burstein is very intelligent and a good person but there was a major disconnect between her and the class. She would get frustrated when people asked questions, her instruction of the materials was very confusing and all over the place.

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