Spring 2010 Course Schedule

Ext Sem: Admin Law in Fed Govt (LAW-769-002)
Lubbers

Meets: 06:00 PM - 07:50 PM (M) - Room 314

Enrolled: 5 / Limit: 15

Administrator Access


Notices

Corequisite: LAW-899, Supervised Externship Students' externship should be with a federal administrative agency. In some cases other exterships may qualify. Contact Prof. Lubbers (JSL26@aol.com) NOTE: CLASS WILL MEET IN SMALL GROUPS FOR AN EXTRA HOUR EVERY OTHER WEEK. TIME TBD. Registering for your field placement credits is a separate process. Students must first register for a seminar and then go to www.wcl.american.edu/externship to submit a Request for Approval, which generates the necessary forms. Students with concerns about placement approval should speak with a member of the Externship Staff. Students are not registered for field credits until they submit the signed add/drop form to the registrar.

Description

Externship seminars provide students with an opportunity to engage in critical reflection about the legal profession, their own future legal careers, and their priorities and values as lawyers in conjunction with their field placement experiences. Supervised Externship Seminar: Administrative Law in the Federal Government is a three-credit, one semester, graded course in which students enroll while engaged in fieldwork for additional academic credit at a federal government executive branch agency. The primary purpose of this course is to enrich and provide an academic context for your externship through an overview of a wide range of administrative law topics and through reflective study of your fieldwork experience. The course will cover issues such as the role of agency lawyers in agency adjudication, rulemaking, enforcement, and judicial review, the role of offices of general counsel, ADR, FOIA, government ethics, and congressional relations. The focus of the seminar will be how these substantive areas are relevant at your agency. In class and through your journal writing you will have the opportunity to think and talk about how you feel about working as a lawyer in the public sector. Do civil servants get a “bad rap?” Who is the client? Are agency procedures fair and/or efficient? What are the work skills needed to be a lawyer in a large organization, including time management, dealing with office hierarchies; seeking desirable work assignments and participation in interesting events, eliciting clear instructions and supervision, responding to unethical behavior, and other workplace problems? The placement experience might be viewed as a microcosm of a possible future career as a public service lawyer. The course, combined with the fieldwork, offers you an opportunity to explore the pros and cons of government lawyering, to think carefully about it as a possible career, and, to obtain advice from experienced government lawyers about how to make such a career worthwhile and fulfilling.

Textbooks and Other Materials

The textbook information on this page was provided by the instructor. Students should use this information when considering purchases from the AU Campus Store or other vendors. Students may check to determine if books are currently available for purchase online.

There is no textbook, only supplemental readings, to be purchased on the 4th floor of WCL.

First Class Readings

Please read the Introduction to the Course (syllabus) and the Schedule of Classes and Assignments. Please read these items with particular care—they offer instructions and information about course requirements.

Syllabus

Use your MyAU username and password to access the syllabus in the following format(s):