OLDFall 2022 Law School Course Evaluations

big takeaway from a case made explicit and how it applies to a particular situation(s). The aspect that I think could be improved the most would be offering more practice essay questions, especially considering the entire final is all essays. I think that having a narrow word limit on an exam, simply sets up students in their first semester, for failure. The point of the first semester is for students to learn the material, but also develop effective strategies, and having a narrow word limit creates increased stress, and offers little to no benefit, other than to make grading essays faster for the professor. Furthermore, the time sensitive nature of the final, makes having a word limit detrimental because the student has to ad hoc figure out where to chip away at their grade. Professor Burstein, also expects us to cite page numbers or specific parts in cases on our exam; this is a problem because students have to know the exact page everything is on, even if it is not a concept extremely relevant to the overall principle. Citing cases to this degree also chips away at the allotted word count, further detracting from the test experience. I think that focusing more specifically on the FRCP themselves, rather than in the abstract through the text would have made comprehension a lot easier. Cases modifying rules are helpful, but without the foundation it ' s difficult to really get to the application stage of comprehension. I also would have benefited from more opportunities for office hours and one on-one conversations with Professor Burstein. While I understand the importance of taking the time process and analyze the materials on my own, sometimes just the act of meeting with the Professor to dig deeper into more complicated issues makes all the difference. Yes, we have a wonderful TA who provided a lot of clarity, but having the time to meet with the Professor too is absolutely pivotal. Beyond this, I think that while the guest speakers in class were certainly interesting and such a pleasure to meet, the class would have benefited from more time to really grasp the rules and concepts to build the foundation of Civil Procedure understanding. For some reason I had a difficult time understanding core concepts from just the textbook (it ' s pretty dense) and classes on their own. I had to use other study materials from West Academic to supplement our class material in order to truly understand some of the rules and bigger ideas like jurisdiction. While Professor Burstein is good at provoking thoughtful conversations about our cases, I think for me personally a more straightforward approach at times would ' ve made civ pro easier to understand Providing students additional out of class materials to study from; I know other classes used the Examples and Materials text to assist in discussing the material but the only provided hypo/ review material was the midterm. This made studying for an exam challenging because we had no background for what to expect from the professor. I wish Professor Burstein provided more context, especially when we got later in the course. It would have been nice to see how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

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