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.