Skills & Values: The First Amendment

The Skills & Values Series is an innovative hybrid series of subject-specific, practice-oriented books. The series is designed as a tool for professors to teach practical and analytical skills that can help students serve future clients competently, skillfully, and in an ethical manner.

Skills & Values: The First Amendment allows students to experience the connection between theory, doctrine, and practice in First Amendment law. The exercises provide an opportunity for studying First Amendment concepts from the perspective of a practicing attorney who must not only know the law, but also employ lawyering skills and values—such as legal strategy, factual development, advocacy, counseling, drafting, problem solving, and ethical principles—in zealously representing a client.

Each chapter in Skills & Values: The First Amendment addresses a specific topic covered in most First Amendment law school courses. The chapters begin with an introduction to help bridge the gap between the actual practice of law and the doctrine and theory studied in class. Students will then have the opportunity to engage in active, "hands on" learning by working through a stand-alone exercise that simulates a real-life legal dilemma. The exercises are as authentic as possible, incorporating materials such as legal pleadings, motions, correspondence, judicial opinions, statutes, discovery materials, and deposition excerpts. The self-assessment tool included at the end of each chapter suggests ways that a practicing attorney might have approached each exercise. It is not meant to provide "the answer," but to identify issues and strategies students should have considered in order to effectively represent a client.

The topics covered in Skills & Values: The First Amendment:

• Incitement and Illegal Activity
• Obscenity and Sexually Explicit Material
• The Fighting Words Doctrine
• Government and Commercial Speech
• Time, Place and Manner Restrictions
• Public Employee and Public School Student's Speech Rights
• Freedom of Expressive Association
• The Political Process and the First Amendment
• The Newsgathering Function and Freedom of the Press
• The Establishment and Free Exercises Clauses
• Vagueness and Overbreadth