Prof. Ankers is a fun, affable man. I took his “Anatomy of a Commercial Trial” course in Fall 2019 and enjoyed it immensely. You can tell he genuinely enjoys teaching this class and wants his students to have fun. The work load is minimal, especially given that it is a 3 credit course. Once or twice over the semester, we did need to pop out a ~15 page motion in 48 hours, but he was never focused on the substance of the paper–only the strategic choices about which argument to make.
My only critique is that you don’t learn that much. The course does help you see all the rules from Civ Pro play out in a full trial, but beyond that it’s hard to learn much about litigation in a truncated 3.5 month course. Nevertheless, it is a fun, lite class that can balance out your heavier classes.
I hate to say it because Norm Ankers is such a nice guy, but the Law of Evidentiary Privilege just didn’t work. It probably should just be covered in 1 class in Evidence. Class DRAGGED on horribly with people spouting off on their random policy opinions regarding privileges. There wasn’t really a syllabus and I was surprised to learn about 1/2 way through that we’d be drafting motions…they were ungraded and we could work in groups but it was still kind of annoying.
Reading workload was extremely heavy, but in the end I didn’t reference the reading once while doing the exam. It was an untimed take home exam and I didn’t even study (nor would studying have helped). Exam was extremely fair and straightforward. You basically had to look stuff up on Lexis and write briefs to answer the questions because none of the cases he gave us to read were helpful in answering the questions, but we knew that going into the exam.
MLaw Prof Reviews
Prof. Ankers is a fun, affable man. I took his “Anatomy of a Commercial Trial” course in Fall 2019 and enjoyed it immensely. You can tell he genuinely enjoys teaching this class and wants his students to have fun. The work load is minimal, especially given that it is a 3 credit course. Once or twice over the semester, we did need to pop out a ~15 page motion in 48 hours, but he was never focused on the substance of the paper–only the strategic choices about which argument to make.
My only critique is that you don’t learn that much. The course does help you see all the rules from Civ Pro play out in a full trial, but beyond that it’s hard to learn much about litigation in a truncated 3.5 month course. Nevertheless, it is a fun, lite class that can balance out your heavier classes.
I hate to say it because Norm Ankers is such a nice guy, but the Law of Evidentiary Privilege just didn’t work. It probably should just be covered in 1 class in Evidence. Class DRAGGED on horribly with people spouting off on their random policy opinions regarding privileges. There wasn’t really a syllabus and I was surprised to learn about 1/2 way through that we’d be drafting motions…they were ungraded and we could work in groups but it was still kind of annoying.
Reading workload was extremely heavy, but in the end I didn’t reference the reading once while doing the exam. It was an untimed take home exam and I didn’t even study (nor would studying have helped). Exam was extremely fair and straightforward. You basically had to look stuff up on Lexis and write briefs to answer the questions because none of the cases he gave us to read were helpful in answering the questions, but we knew that going into the exam.