319.01 Analytical Methods

Lawyers face non-legal, analytical issues every day. Business lawyers need to understand a business in order to represent their client properly. Litigators need to judge the best route in adopting a litigation strategy. Family lawyers routinely need to value a business. Environmental lawyers need to understand economic externalities. Social lawyers need familiarity with financial instruments that have positive and negative attributes. Students taking this course will find it foundational in running a business, advising a business, or litigating business matters that go beyond the strict letter of the law. In this sense, this is not your standard doctrinal law school course. Rather, it is designed to give students the tools necessary to interact with the business community and run a company or firm. While there is no prerequisite for this course, students should be comfortable with numbers and graphs.

The areas of focus include:

  1. Decision Analysis, Games and Information: We will explore a standard technique that has been developed to organize thinking about decision-making problems and to solve them.
  2. Accounting: Basic accounting concepts will be introduced, and the relationship between accounting information and economic reality will be examined.
  3. Microeconomics: This unit presents basic economic concepts--the operation of competitive markets, imperfect competition, and market failures--that are necessary to this understanding.
  4. Statistics: We will address the basic statistical methods, including regression analysis, as well as issues that commonly arise when statistics are used in the courtroom.

The course grade will be made up of (roughly) weekly problem sets, and a final examination.

Special Notes:

FAST TRACK: Class Meets: Aug 27-Oct 15

Fall 2019

Course Number Course Credits Evaluation Method Instructor
319.01
Course Credits
Final Exam
Practical exercises
Class participation
John M. de Figueiredo
Sakai site: https://sakai.duke.edu/portal/site/LAW.319.01.F19
Email list: LAW.319.01.F19@sakai.duke.edu
Course
Degree Requirements
Course Requirements - JD
Course Requirements - JD-LLM-LE
Course Areas of Practice