Sponsored Post: Real Property for the Real World: Experiential Education Made Easy

The following post is by Heather K. Way (Texas), Lucille D. Wood (Texas), and Tanya Marsh (Wake Forest) and is sponsored by West Academic.

Have you been thinking lately about bringing experiential education opportunities into your classroom? Not sure about how much or how little you can do with the 1Ls?

Your timing really couldn’t be better. Students are clamoring for more “experiential education,” and new “skills-building” curricular requirements abound. We are three practicing attorneys who really enjoy teaching property concepts through our casework. In our new book, Real Property for the Real World, we have drawn from our practice experiences to share with you eight accessible and interesting case studies that will engage your 1Ls in property law—their new favorite first-year subject.

This book has its origins in our desire to teach our cases, because the cases deal with contemporary “hot button” issues that we care about, and because we have found that students care about these issues too. Two of us have legal aid backgrounds and have worked intensively in low-income communities. One of us is now a tenured doctrinal property law prof. We wanted to bring the excitement students often have in clinical settings into the very first semester of law school. To do that, we set out to introduce students to property through complicated situations in which our former clients’ homes and livelihoods were on the line. We think these kinds of cases allow 1Ls to see quickly how property law is never boring.

In short, Real Property for the Real World is a one-stop experiential ed shop for property law professors where you can get what you need to bring in skills-building while reinforcing property doctrine through low-dose or high-impact experiences, right down to detailed tables that show the number of minutes in prep and class time you should expect to use for each case study.