Spring 2025
Professor(s):
Lonny Hoffman (FACULTY)
Credits: 3
Course Areas: Law And Society/ Interdisciplinary
Time: 9:00a-12:00p F Location: 102B
Course Outline: This course rigorously explores the challenges to well-being facing law students and legal professionals and the opportunities available for overcoming those challenges. The class’s animating framing is around mindfulness training. As you may realize, mindfulness is a wide-ranging idea that may have different meanings so it’s important for us to clarify the type of mindfulness we’ll be practicing. The most important thing to say now is that this class’s central objective is for students to gain greater awareness of how their minds work and to feel how clearer awareness can be a path to more sustainable well-being. For more, see the syllabus.
Course Syllabus: Syllabus (current as of March 22).
Course Notes: (Face-to-Face) The UH registration system instruction mode for this course is listed in parenthesis. 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.
Quota=20.
This three-credit course is limited to twenty students.
Students are evaluated in three ways:
Class engagement: Worth 15% of the final grade.
Short reflective papers: Students will write three short, non-anonymous reflective papers (usually no more than two to four typed, double-spaced pages). Assignments are noted in the syllabus. The instructors will provide more detailed guidance so students can know what is expected of them and how they’ll be evaluated. The short papers, collectively, are worth 15% of the final grade.
Presentation and long paper: Students will also do a presentation about their field assignment. The field assignment is near the end of the semester. Students will teach some aspect of what they’ve learned in the course to others and then do a presentation to the entire class on their learning experience from this assignment. The presentation is worth 20% of the final grade. Finally, students will write one longer non-anonymous paper based on the topic that they chose for their field assignment. This paper should be between 8-10 typed, double-spaced pages. It is due by no later than Thursday, April 24 at 5:00 pm. As with the short reflective papers and the presentation, the instructors will separately provide more detailed guidance as to the expected content of the long paper and how it will be evaluated. The long paper is worth 50% of the final grade.
Prerequisites:
First Day Assignments:
Final Exam Schedule:
This course will have:
Exam:
Paper:
Satisfies Senior Upper Level Writing Requirement: No
Experiential Course Type: simulation
Bar Course: No
DistanceEd ABA: No
Pass-Fail Student Election: Available
Course Materials
No book required for this course
