This course is meant to be a comprehensive overview of the American Legal System. It will cover the American court system, the Attorney-Client relationship, alternative dispute resolution, and the broad areas of Criminal law, Tort law and Contract law. Students will be introduced to the language of law, taught how to dissect case opinions and will learn how to form and confront legal theories. After taking this course, students will have a general concept of how civil and criminal legal proceedings are initiated, have a general understanding of where our law comes from, how it continues to evolve and the method in which it is practiced in the United States. This is an introductory course and therefore no pre-law experience is necessary.

In the work sample I chose to present, I was able to answer an essay question to a take home test we were given in class. The question was about three reforms that our criminal justice system needs to make. As well as why the reforms need to happen. One of the reforms is about how many laws there are. Many people do not know them simply because of how many laws the US code contains. A lot of people are not just going to sit around and read all of them. The second reform is about drug sentencing and how most people who are convicted of drug related crimes get the longest maximum sentences out of any crime that one can commit. The third and final reform would be about overcriminalization, which is defined as making regulatory things criminal. Many people would not be aware of regulatory things being made criminal, therefore, leading to people getting arrested. It was said that Congress was responsible for 5,000 of the over 300,000 criminally enforced rules. This was very important to the course because we had to pick apart the problems with our justice system. We also had to come up with reforms to it, we looked at problems and had to say why they needed to be fixed, which is what makes it important to this course.