Gregory Crespi on Teaching Four-Credit Contracts Classes

We are fortunate to be able to share another guest post by Gregory Crespi (right), who holds the Homer R. Mitchell Endowed Professorship in Commercial and Insurance Law and Professor of Law at SMU’s Dedman School of Law. Here’s the post:

There has been an active thread recently on one of the AALS member blogs regarding the merits of teaching Contracts as a single-semester, 4-credit class instead of as a two-semester 5- or 6-credit sequence. My view is that changing Contracts from a two-semester sequence to a one-semester, 4-credit course is a very bad idea, pedagogically. 

This move does increase faculty flexibility for taking one-semester leaves without causing as much curricular scheduling disruption, and it gives the opportunity for contract law faculty to teach another upper-level class in line with their interests and expertise, but it comes at a definite cost of restricting the completeness and coherence of first-year Contracts. Nice for some faculty and Deans, but bad for 1L students. 

After teaching Contracts in a two-semester format for over 30 years here at SMU I have now taught the class twice in our new one-semester, 4-credit format, taught during the first 1L semester. It was very painful for me to have to cut out fourteen 50-minute class periods of coverage from my prior two-semester, 5-credit course sequence.  

In brief summary here: lots of UCC material now had to be omitted (and I had no time even to cursorily cover UCC S. 2-207); far fewer cases could be discussed across the board; there had to be much less general discussion of various subtle jurisprudential issues spilling over into other areas of law; there was little if any time for discussion of the complexities of the parol evidence rule or of subsequent contractual modifications; there had to be a more cursory coverage of the numerous enforceability defenses, many aspects of the doctrine of conditions, anticipatory repudiation and adequate assurance; and I had to give less coverage to the excuse defenses and to the important area of remedies. It is now a significantly inferior class to what I taught before, despite my best efforts, although I think the class is still at least minimally sufficient for later bar exam success in that area of law.

I compensate somewhat for the fewer class hours I now have by holding optional (but essentially required for students to do well) one-hour weekly review sessions all semester long where I work through old final exam questions and prior “A” answers from former students as we complete blocks of material covered by those questions, so that I do not have to spend my limited class time on reviewing prior material or working through exam-type hypotheticals. I continue to teach the class in a 50-minute class format to better keep the students’ attention, now meeting 4 days/week, rather than holding 75-minute or 100-minute classes. I hope there is eventually a pendulum swing in academia back to a two-semester format for this class, and hopefully also to a full 6 credits for that sequence.