Contract Law - Spring 2025 - Section 1C
Spring 2025 will be the third time that Suffolk has offered the Contracts course as a one-semester four credit course. So you will have the benefit of previous trials and errors. Here are the current (subject to change) syllabus and class schedule.
P.S. If you are thinking about doing some reading ahead of law school, I wouldn’t worry about getting a head start on the actual material. I’d instead suggest reading a couple of really good books about being a lawyer.
1. A great book about the complexities of doing big corporate deals and then the litigation that can ensue when things don’t go according to plan - Thomas Petzinger, Oil and Honor. It’s about the famous case in which Pennzoil negotiated and signed a contract to buy Getty Oil, and then lost the deal to Texaco, which swooped in at the last minute. The first half is about making the deal; the second half is about the trial.
2. A classic novel about a murder trial (written under a pseudonym by a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court) made into a great movie - Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder. The movie stars James Stewart, Lee Remick, and Ben Gazzara. It was filmed on location in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, featured the hero of the Army-McCarthy hearing, Joseph Welch (then a partner at Hale & Dorr in Boston, now known as Wilmer Hale) as the trial judge, and was the first major Hollywood movie with a score by a Black composer, Duke Ellington (who also appeared in the film playing in a local UP bar).
3. In Contracts, we use a compendium of rules called the Restatement (Second) of Contracts as a pedagogical tool. The Restatement (abbreviated as the “R2K”) distills case law holdings into black-letter rules that can be applied in the process of reasoning a legal problem to a conclusion. I have written about what there is to like and dislike about the Restatement here.