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Shared Governance at Detroit Mercy: Curriculum Committee

Curriculum Committee Membership 2020-2021

Prof.Cara Cunningham Warren, Co-Chair

Prof. Deborah Paruch, Co-Chair

Prof. David Barry

Prof. Cristina Lockwood (Fall)

Prof. Michelle Richards

Assoc. Dean Richard Broughton, ex officio

Assoc. Dean Nicholas Schroeck, ex officio

Assoc. Dean Shamaila Khan, ex officio

Curriculum Committee Charges 2020-2021

Curriculum Committee

The Curriculum Committee ensures the School’s curriculum is coherent, reflects best practices in legal education, and well serves our student population. The Committee also investigates how institutional racism impacts our curriculum and identifies steps to eradicate that impact.

In 2020-21 the Curriculum Committee will:

1.  Investigate how institutional racism impacts our curriculum and identify steps to eradicate that impact.

2.  Given the importance of applying the law to the facts in the practice of law and on the bar exam, continue to facilitate  faculty conversations about how individual professors should best address the problem of students’ difficulty with applying the law to the facts in their written course work.

3.  Continue evaluating whether to modify the Fall and Winter class schedules to include more classes meeting more often and in smaller time blocks each week.

4.  Evaluate allowing paid externships.

5.  Analyze whether we should adopt a thirteen-week schedule, comparable to Windsor Law's.

6.  Continue our work on assessments.

7.  Consider and recommend to the faculty whether to exempt clinics (and other courses?0 from the mandatory grading curve.

8.  Consider and recommend to the faculty whether to change the experiential course requirement for Dual JD students to permit them the option of an LFP or externship in addition to a clinic.

9. Consider and recommend to faculty whether to allow a student to take a course P/NP when, while it is a required course, it is not a required course for the individual student because they have already fulfilled the requirement (e.g. a requirement in another course),