From Decatur Street to Hotlanta!

The first part of my June scholarship and teaching tour is now done.  Having just returned from the Law and Society Association conference in New Orleans (about which I will say more in later posts), I now am preparing for my presentation on Friday at "Method in the Madness: The Art and Science of Teaching Transactional Law and Skills," this year's conference hosted by Emory University School of Law's Center for Transactional Law and Practice.  Emory Law convenes these conferences every other year.  The conferences always focus on teaching transactional business law and skills.

Here's the abstract for my presentation:

Drafting Corporate Bylaws: From Alpha to Omega

The archetypal introductory law school course in business associations law characteristically introduces students to corporate bylaws. Typically, course references to corporate bylaws occur in the context of corporate formation and in cases construing corporate bylaws in the context of private ordering, fundamental corporate changes, and the like. Treatment of the subject is necessarily somewhat superficial and episodic. Although students may be exposed to bylaw provisions and even, in some cases, a sample set of corporate bylaws, little time exists in the standard basic Business Associations course to address the optimal drafting process for drafting organic documents (including corporate bylaws).

An advanced business associations offering or a business planning course, however, provides a wonderful opportunity to engage students in this type of activity and give them a deeper appreciation for the governance significance of corporate bylaws. For the past two years, I have taught a module in Representing Enterprises, a transaction simulation course offered to participants in The University of Tennessee College of Law’s Concentration in Business Transactions, that focuses on drafting bylaws for a closely held start-up corporation organized under Tennessee law. The module offers a sequenced approach to the construction of corporate bylaws, starting with an in-depth survey of applicable statutory and decisional law, progressing through the identification of forms and norms, and ending with individual and group drafting exercises. The five class meetings (ten classroom hours in total over a period of two-and-a-half weeks) in the module engage facilitated peer-to-peer teaching and focus on relevant drafting processes (incorporating and reflecting on the students’ approaches to the required course assignments) and resulting outtakes (more precisely, takeaways).

In this presentation, I will share in more detail the content of and pedagogy involved in this course offering. As support, I will supply all participants with the module syllabus and the staged series of assignments that I give to the students to execute on the embodied learning objectives. This presentation should be particularly useful to those offering, planning on offering, or considering offering a business entity planning and drafting opportunity for law students. But it also may be valuable for those teaching introductory doctrinal offerings in business associations law.

If you cannot be at the conference and are interested in the materials supporting or PowerPoint slides for this presentation, please just let me know.  

Also, you may want to note that many (most) presentations at the conference will be memorialized in a forthcoming volume of our student-edited business law journal, Transactions: Tennessee Journal of Business Law.  Transactions has been a partner of Emory Law in its biennial conferences from the start.  The Transactions volumes from the Emory Law conferences typically are quite popular among business law instructors.  I use my copies a fair amount.  So, you may want to get one of these, too.  Just fyi: the book usually comes out in the spring semester following the conference.  Also note that some of the included works are produced from transcripts of the proceedings (very tough to do) and some are papers prepared by the presenters on the topic of their presentation.

Atlanta, here I come!