University of Houston Law Center Logo Give Now  
HOME
Faculty

Printable Version

Spring 2023
5303 Criminal Law - THOMPSON- 11083

Professor(s): Sandra Thompson (FACULTY)

Credits: 3

Course Areas: 1st Year - Section A 

Time: 10:30a-12:00p  MW  Location: 210 

Course Outline: This substantive criminal law course aims to provide you with four basic competencies to equip you to practice criminal law, and these skills will serve you well as lawyers in whatever field you may choose. First, the course will familiarize you with blackletter criminal law. A second area of competency this course will provide is the skill of statutory analysis. Third, this course will prepare you to address the most fundamental ethical and philosophical issues regarding the punishment of human beings for wrongdoing. A fourth thing this course will do is to introduce you to some of the practice skills you will need to handle criminal law cases as a lawyer.

Course Syllabus: Syllabus

Course Notes: (Face-to-Face)   The UH registration system instruction mode for this course is listed in parenthesis. After student registration opens, there may be instruction mode changes to this course up through two weeks before the first day of classes for the term, but notice of such changes will be sent to then-registered students. For this instruction mode, instructors and students are expected to normally be physically present in the classroom. If the course has a final examination, it will be in a classroom requiring your physical presence. Other assessment, such as a mid-term exam, may also be in a classroom. Whether this instructor will offer “remote presence” (starting a zoom meeting from the podium computer to enable student remote access on an occasional basis) for part or all of the semester is not known, but students should not rely on an expectation that remote presence will be available.

Prerequisites:  

First Day Assignments:

Final Exam Schedule: 05/05 9am-12pm  210    

This course will have:
Exam:
Paper:


Satisfies Senior Upper Level Writing Requirement: No

Experiential Course Type: No

Bar Course: No

DistanceEd ABA: No

Pass-Fail Student Election: Unavailable (Required Course)

Course Materials

Special Case

Joshua Dressler and Stephen P. Garvey, Cases and Materials on Criminal Law (9th edition) ISBN- 9781647087708
----
Supplementary Readings (available on Blackboard). Note: The book entitled “Understanding


Criminal Law” by Dressler is a supplementary aid that may be helpful. A copy is in the library.

University of Houston Law Center

4170 Martin Luther King Blvd
Houston, TX 77204-6060

713-743-2100 General
713-743-2094 Legal Clinics