As much as I would like to single out one person who had the most influence during my law school experience at Georgetown, like Kali Murray, I am going to break the rules here a little bit.

The greatest influence on me was, in fact, the course of study that I chose to pursue in my first year of law school. While most 1L’s take the traditional torts, contracts, property, etc., I was treated to a different group of classes that included: Bargain, Exchange & Liability; Property in Time; and Democracy & Coercion, to name a few. In addition, I took a small 1L Seminar on the different schools of legal thought (Critical Race Theory, Legal Process, Law & Economics), as well as a jurisprudence class called Legal Theory (where we read books like Anthony Kronman’s Lost Lawyer and Ronald Dworkin’s Law’s Empire).

All of these classes were part of the Section 3 experimental curriculum at Georgetown Law, which was created by a forward-looking group of professors who challenged the normal way of teaching law to students. The group who taught me in this experimental curriculum included many luminaries: Mark Tushnet (Government Processes), Wendy Perdue (Process), Mike Seidman (Democracy & Coercion and 1L Seminar), Dennis Patterson (visiting that year) (Legal Theory), Mike Gottesman (Bargain, Exchange & Liability), and Dan Ernst (Property in Time).

The combined Section 3 experience had a peculiar way of binding together not only the students who took this curriculum, but also the professors and students.

It is no surprise, therefore, that two of those professors (Profs. Seidman and Gottesman) are mentors of mine and were good enough to be recommenders for me when I went through the American Association of Law Schools’ “meat market” for faculty hiring.

But it was more than that. As a group, Section 3 students affirmatively opted into this experience, and most believed in the value of learning the law this way. It is true that I may not have the same depth in contracts and torts of some of my colleagues who took six credits in these areas, but that deficit was more than made up by the ability to have substantial classes in administrative law, jurisprudence, and legal history during my first year. It taught me early on to think in an expansive way about the law and what roles law might play in a society.

I believe Georgetown still offers this alternative, and I would encourage those who have the opportunity to sign up for this innovative curriculum to do so. I think I can honestly say that without the professors in that curriculum, who drove us to look at the law from this unique perspective, I might not be sitting where I am today. And I believe is it no small coincidence, that two of my Section 3 classmates from the Class of ’97 (Erica Hashimoto and Nancy Hogshead-Makar) have also found their way into the legal academy.