OLDFall 2022 Law School Course Evaluations

to what was said, and unfortunately, her slides were not always up in a timely fashion. The professor is a nice person but she needs to realize that we are 1Ls and that we are new to law school learning. She spends most of the class talking about the cases and not actually teaching us the topic sometimes or maybe going through the topic too fast. She doesn ' t use the board which caused a lot of students to zone out while she is talking. She expects us to know a lot of the information as if we are not new to learning all of this and she does not provide any resource materials like practice exams, hypos, websites to go to, videos to watch to better understand the topic. She just wants us to do the readings and learn everything we are supposed to know from there. This professor needs to not teach 1L ' s. Truthfully, I was disappointed with the way Professor Burstein carried the class. I felt as our semester went on she was hostile, rude, and disrespectful to students during our class times. It did not feel like a good class environment. Additionally, I felt as though we went on a lot of tangents during class which made the already confusing material a lot harder to follow. I had to rely heavily on the TA ' s review sessions to have an understanding of the material that we covered. Course Structure and Materials: Civil Procedure seemed to have been structured around two main concepts - jurisdiction and procedure. We spent the first half of the course diving deep into personal jurisdiction, subject matter jurisdiction, and venue, before taking almost a month off in the middle of the semester for guest speakers and the mock midterm. After that, it was late October, and the course began sprinting through procedure - adjudication, discovery, choice of law, preclusion, joinder, and more. None of the material assigned during the second half of the semester was effectively reinforced, despite being far more complex and technical. I would recommend having less guest speakers, or, spreading them out throughout the semester, so as to lend more consistency to the course and keep students engaged with the material. I would also, if possible, try to cut back on the number of classes dedicated to jurisdictional topics and try to leave more time for procedure. Also, the casebook that was used seemed to presume a background understanding of certain legal topics - namely torts, contracts, and even some business law. It was difficult to pick apart the casebook and extract what was actually needed for understanding civil procedure. Class Structure: Rather than immediately jumping into case discussions, I would recommend that Professor Burstein takes time at the beginning of each lecture to ground the class in an understanding of the topic being discussed that day. Personally, I always came to class confused and with questions, and jumping right into cases, without doing a basic overview of the topic of the day, was ineffective. After an overview, I think that discussions of cases, policy, and more is an interesting way to further understand the material. Not setting aside time to discuss the mechanics of procedure in a procedure class seems counterintuitive and is frankly confusing for students. Opportunities for Practice

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