All VLS Courses

ABCs of Analyzing Energy and the Environment

This course sets out, in three linked modules, the fundamental knowledge that professionals should have for working in the closely intertwined fields of energy and the environment. Students may take one, two, or three modules for one credit each.
Module A: Engineering Fundamentals for Analyzing Energy and the Environment
The engineering realities of electric power grids and natural gas pipelines greatly constrain the choices that lawyers and policy analysts might otherwise make. This module will cover the engineering fundamentals inherent in the current and expected energy infrastructure.
Module B: Business Fundamentals for Analyzing Energy and the Environment
The energy and electric power industries in the U.S. are facing unprecedented challenges in meeting our society’s demands for low-cost, high-reliability energy and electricity with lower environmental impacts. This module will introduce the major financial and economic factors that energy companies use in making production and investment decisions, and how emerging environmental regulations might affect these decisions. The module will also cover deregulated market structures in the petroleum, natural gas and electric power industries.
Module C: Legal Fundamentals for Analyzing Energy and the Environment
Decades of controversy and development have created a detailed legal and regulatory structure that channels and often defines the choices made by energy providers and users. This module will cover the key jurisdictional, procedural, and substantive elements of the federal and state laws most directly affecting energy and the environment.

Download Module A Syllabus

Download Module B Syllabus

Download Module C Syllabus

Accounting and Business Fundamentals

The first third of this course is spent on three texts: Anthony's Essentials of Accounting, Friedlob and Welton's Keys to Reading an Annual Report, and Peterson's Running on Empty.  The texts establish the fundamental concepts that students use.  The course has in-class presentations by experts from the legal and business communities.  Class sessions will be devoted to considering various aspects of socially responsible investing.  The final third of the course is devoted to research on specific entities chosen by the students.  Teams of students pick a company or non-profit organization, research the financial structure and story, and present the research to the class using PowerPoint presentation software.  This provides students the opportunity to use theory to understand and communicate accounting and business fundamentals using modern technology.  As part of the course, students write a short paper, make an in-class presentation, and complete a take-home final project. 

The course is structured to provide students with the opportunity to learn in multiple ways.  The final class is devoted to a discussion about Cass Sunstein's book, Nudge.

Administrative Law

The goal of Administrative Law is to provide students with a working knowledge of the general principles of administrative law, a general knowledge of the workings of bureaucratic institutions, and an understanding of the critiques of government.  In the course we study the implementation of legislative policy through administrative agencies, including the role of administrative agencies in the governmental process, rulemaking, adjudication, and judicial review of agency actions.

Administrative Procedure and the Environment

This course reviews the legal doctrines that empower and constrain the so-called fourth branch of government-administrative agencies. In many arenas, but particularly in the realm of environmental policy, administrative agencies often "make" more law than courts or legislative bodies, and that law generally has more direct consequences for industry and society. Administrative law is thus fundamentally concerned with whether and how unelected bureaucrats are held accountable as they implement legislative policies. Major topics include agency exercises of power, rulemaking, adjudication, individual participation in agency processes, and judicial review of agency action.
Required for MELP

Download Course Syllabus

ADR and the Environment

This course explores the nature and characteristics of environmental disputes, examines alternative dispute resolution (ADR) processes, and assesses policy and practical considerations that are relevant when selecting a process (including litigation) for resolution of a particular dispute. Statutes, including the Administrative Dispute Resolution Act and the Negotiated Rulemaking Act, will be examined. Simulations, including mediation and arbitration of siting disputes, are used to provide practical exposure to the ADR processes studied. Students cannot take both this course and Alternative Dispute Resolution.
Environmental Law and Administrative Law are recommended, but not required.

Download Course Syllabus

Advanced Alternative Dispute Resolution

This course presents the theory and practice of negotiation, mediation and similar processes that constitute the foundation of alternative dispute resolution (ADR).  This survey course focuses on the theory and practice of techniques that can be used as an alternative or an addition to formal litigation such as negotiation, mediation, as well as other forms of assisted negotiation.  Students will examine the different theories, approaches and the wide range of issues (e.g. legal, economic, sociological, moral, ethical, psychological, political to name a few) that arise in the selection and application of these dispute resolution techniques.  In addition to classroom discussion, students will participate in simulation exercises in order to engage the different techniques as a neutral, an advocate and a disputant.
Students cannot take this course and Environmental Dispute Resolution or ADR & the Environment.
Satisfies skills requirement.

Advanced Appellate Advocacy

Advanced Appellate Advocacy is a required course for students who will be on the Moot Court Advisory Board for the following academic year.  Selection for the course replaces the former Moot Court competition, and is dependent upon expressed interest, performance in the Appellate Advocacy course and oral argument.  The course will involve three major components: writing, mooting, and mentoring and evaluation.  In the writing component, students will draft three substantive briefs and address issues typically found in interscholastic moot court competitions.  The mooting component involves four oral arguments, including a final competition and the opportunity to argue before the Vermont Supreme Court.  The mentoring and evaluation component involves students working as peer mentors, developing competition rubrics, and reflection on oral argument skills.  Interested students should submit an application for the course by the announced deadline.  Students selected for the course will be notified in late December.

Satisfies skills requirement.

Advanced Civil Procedure Seminar

This is a drafting course that satisfies the skills requirement.  Students, working with Professor Wroth in his capacity as Reporter to the Vermont Supreme Court's Advisory Committees on procedural rules, will be briefed on judicial rulemaking and federal restyling guidelines and will draft proposed amendments to sets of Vermont Rules , with explanatory notes. The restyling guidelines are those  used in the December 2007 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which completely "restyled" the language and format of those Rules.  Students will participate in the judicial rulemaking process by orally presenting their drafts to the appropriate Advisory Committee, which will ultimately propose a restyled set of Rules to the Court.

Although the seminar is presently scheduled for a specific day and time, an initial meeting time and subsequent class meetings and assignments will be scheduled for times that are mutually convenient for all participants.

Satisfies skills requirement.

Advanced Criminal Law Seminar

This course will undertake an intensive and comprehensive examination of various aspects of constitutional criminal procedure law, criminal practice, and law enforcement and public policy issues, viewed through the prism of law and policy relating to the "war on drugs." Topics will include recent developments in Fourth Amendment search and seizure law (with special emphasis on the changing jurisprudence of the exclusionary rule), Title III wiretap law and the use of electronic surveillance in the narcotics context, relationships between the international narcotics trade and violence, gun and national security issues (with consideration of case studies including spiraling drug cartel violence in Mexico and narco-terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere), the decriminalization debate and narcotics sentencing issues.

Advanced Energy Writing Seminar

Seminar topics will include proposals for reducing the economic and environmental costs of meeting energy needs.  Because of its importance for both finance and emissions, the electricity sector will be a major focus of this class.  Efforts to reduce costs through more efficient delivery and end-use will be assessed, with specific attention to the statutory, regulatory, and contractual techniques for creating sound incentives. Each student will need to produce a significant written paper based on sophisticated research and thinking about a key area in energy policy and law.  Writing requirements may be co-ordinated with (but must supplement) LL.M. or M.E.L.P. requirements.  Successful students should emerge with many of the skills useful for contributing to the work of an energy commission, a law firm with an energy practice, an environmental group addressing energy issues, or a company delivering energy or efficiency services.

Prerequisite:  Either Energy Law & Policy In a Carbon Constrained World or Energy Regulation, Markets and Environment (previously or concurrently) or instructor's permission.

JD/MELP:  Distributional requirement  - Policy, Regulatory, and Resource Management/Planning