Study

Duke Law remains committed to a “hybrid” model of instruction for the Fall 2020 semester. As promised earlier this summer, students are not required to be on campus in the fall if they choose to participate remotely due to health and safety concerns, or other considerations—but for those who elect to be in Durham, we will offer some in-person opportunities.

The majority of our courses will be online, including all our doctrinal courses, all larger lecture courses, most simulation courses, and many of our seminars. Some small upper-level courses, including most clinics, ad hoc seminars, readings courses, independent studies, and some externships, will meet in person some or all of the time. Students who prefer to access these types of courses in a completely online format will have that option.

Like other core doctrinal courses, first-year doctrinal courses will be taught online. The faculty teaching these courses, particularly small sections, are planning a range of other ways to supplement online class meetings with optional discussion groups, office hours, and other opportunities for faculty and students to gather in person in small groups. First-year students who prefer a completely online experience will be able to opt for one.

In general, as at the end of the Spring 2020 semester, your classes will take place on the same days and at the same times as ordinarily scheduled, via the remote platform your professor has selected. When classes begin, please review all communications from your faculty carefully to be sure you are aware of asynchronous and synchronous obligations and opportunities. If you have concerns about attendance for a specific class, please contact your faculty member directly. If your attendance concerns are more general, please contact Academic Affairs or Student Affairs.

Mitigating the risk of COVID-19 infection for all members of our community is of paramount importance and, together with a commitment to educational excellence, the guiding principle behind our decision-making. With that in mind, we remind you that all members of the Duke community—students, faculty and staff—will have to observe required health and safety protocols. These include wearing a face covering in all public areas, practicing physical distancing, washing hands frequently, doing daily symptom monitoring, and reporting and following any new guidelines that may be instituted. To protect each other, any of us who is symptomatic or deemed at risk due to contact tracing will need to report the symptoms or contact and undergo follow-up measures, which may include testing and quarantine. If you choose to come to campus, including the Law School building, you will be expected to follow these rules, and also exercise special care with respect to any travel outside of Durham. This agreement will be recognized under the Duke Compact, a statement of mutual commitment to community health and behavioral standards that every student, faculty, and staff member will be required to agree to before the start of the semester.

The revised academic calendar is available on our website. As noted in e-mails to the Duke Law community, LEAD Week and orientation for first-year JD students will be conducted online, from Tuesday, August 18, to Friday, August 21, with first-year Legal Analysis, Research, and Writing classes beginning on Wednesday, August 19. LLM Orientation will also be entirely online. Two classes that are required for LLMs will begin during LLM Orientation: Legal Analysis, Research, and Writing for International Students and Distinctive Aspects of U.S. Law. Due to the change of format, LLM Orientation activities will be spread over two weeks instead of one. LLM students will receive additional information about the dates and the agenda for Orientation in late July.

All first-year JD and upper-level classes will start on Monday, August 24. Classes will be held through the fall, with no scheduled fall break, and end on Friday, November 20. The reading period will be from Monday, November 23, to Monday, November 30, and examinations will be administered remotely from Tuesday, December 1, to Friday, December 11.

Spring semester will start on Tuesday, January 19, for first-year students, and Wednesday, January 20, for upper-level students, and run through the spring, with no scheduled spring break, ending on Tuesday, April 20. The dates for on-campus interviewing and Wintersession will be announced in the coming weeks.

We anticipate having a complete list of courses, including whether specific small courses have in-person options or components, by July 21. Bookbags will open for upper-level students to plan courses on July 24, and we expect the first registration windows to open on July 28 for 3Ls and July 29 for 2Ls. Information sessions on clinics and public interest course planning are scheduled for next week; Assistant Dean Lacoff and James Lambert will also be offering sessions on general questions related to registration, and are available to answer individual academic advising questions by appointment or over e-mail. LLM students will be able to register for courses during Orientation. For more information about LLM course registration, please contact Suzanne Brown in the International Studies Office.

For the Fall 2020 semester, we plan to return to our normal grading system. By establishing our larger and core doctrinal courses in an online format, faculty and students will understand the conditions under which the course will be taught from the start of the semester. Many of the in-person offerings will be ungraded; we hope that those that are graded, such as clinics, are small enough to adapt to changing circumstances without the kinds of disruption that might give rise to a need to modify our grading system.  That said, as we experienced last spring, the pandemic is unpredictable and we cannot foreclose the possibility that our normal grading system will need to be modified, or that individual students or courses will need to be graded differently due to health or other disruptions.

Over the next two weeks, we will be sending out regular updates and information to JD and LLM students about fall registration, including a list of faculty who are available to offer certain in-person opportunities. Please check your e-mail regularly and read messages in their entirety to make sure you don’t miss any updates. In the meantime, you can read more about clinics here—including the new Fall 2020 enrollment policy that allows second-year students to enroll—or please plan to attend (or watch the recording of) the information session scheduled for Tuesday, July 14, at noon Durham time. Second- and third-year JD students can find more information about how to organize an ad hoc seminar here; we have extended the deadline for fall submissions to August 1. If an independent study is of interest, that information, as well as the form that will need to be submitted, is available here.   

The opportunity for in-person externships will necessarily be limited by the conditions and rules in place at the proposed job location—but recognizing that not all of you will be back in Durham this fall, and conditions may also permit working in person at other locations, we have expanded the opportunity for externships away from Durham for the semester. LLM students are permitted to engage in externships during the second semester of their academic studies at Duke Law. Please visit the Externships page, including the FAQ about how such opportunities might operate differently this fall, or contact Anne Gordon for more information.

Based on current guidance from the Student Exchange and Visitor Program (SEVP), we believe that our hybrid model will enable international students on F-1 visas who want to enter or remain in the United States, including first-year students, to maintain their visa status. LLM and upper-level JD students should register for at least one in-person course; we will be in contact with first-year students with further information. At this time we expect that students who want to participate in a fully online format may do so remotely, without traveling to the United States. JD and dual-degree students should contact Assistant Dean Amanda Lacoff or James Lambert for individualized assistance in designing your schedule. LLM students will receive their academic advisor assignments in late July.

To the extent that it is consistent with the advice of medical and public health officials, we want to enable you to enjoy the benefits of in-person interaction with your peers as much as we can. Accordingly, even with our limited space, we are planning to keep our building accessible, but with reduced hours, and to have learning and social activities both in our building and using our outdoor space. For example, we are working on options for some access to the Law School for students to pick up printing jobs, and will update that information soon. Students will be able to reserve specific spaces in the building to study either alone or in small groups during established hours. Based on our space assessment, we anticipate that students will be able to reserve several hours of time per week for study in the building. Student groups will also be able to reserve space for small meetings. As with all planning for the fall, our continued ability to provide access to the building will depend on progress of the virus in addition to our collective agreement to abide by the University’s expectations with symptom-monitoring, wearing face coverings, social distancing, frequent hand-washing, and cleaning.

Café de Novo will not be able to operate in the building as it has in the past. We are investigating whether we may be able to offer some limited grab-and-go food options in the Law School or through partnership with other parts of the University, and will keep you updated on our progress. 

In addition to the activity in the building, our online interactions will extend beyond your coursework. We have already begun to offer larger events and virtual discussions over the spring and summer and will continue to expand what we can do to create community when many of our members are participating from around the globe. Many of our student groups are also beginning to prepare for a semester of virtual events, community-building, and mentoring.

Yes, there will be office hours, in-person when possible, and online in other instances. Your professors will provide information about their plans, and will likely take different approaches depending on the type and nature of a given course. Please be flexible and understand that your professors are all committed to providing all of you, whether in Durham or elsewhere, with an opportunity to connect and ask questions.

Fall 2020 exams will be administered remotely, with no academic or curricular need to remain in Durham past the last day of classes on Friday, November 20.

Yes. We recognize that even in the best of times law students need all types of support in planning your careers and academic schedules and that this support will be even more important during this time of uncertainty. Most of the Law School’s usual support systems and services will be available to all students regardless of whether you are in Durham and whether you engage in in-person offerings at the Law School.  The level of access to University services such as the Student Health Center and DuWell may vary depending on your location, but a number of remote services will be available. If you have questions about your ability to access services, please contact Associate Dean Bill Hoye (william.hoye@duke.law.edu).

In addition, we are continuing to look for ways to support you financially as unexpected needs occur. Last spring, we established an Emergency Fund for graduating students who had expenses related to COVID-19, such as enhanced internet or computer needs or emergency travel. Although that fund has been depleted, we will be redirecting money that would have been used for travel for faculty, staff, or visiting speakers to replenish it and make it available to current students this year. The Student Affairs office will be providing further guidance on how to apply for support.

Some of you have asked about tuition and fees this year. To continue to offer the courses and services we normally do, we will need to charge tuition as planned. However, we are also working with the University to ensure that any fees that are normally assessed (parking, recreation, etc.) reflect the decreased use that you will be able to make of these amenities this year. We will be in touch soon about changes to specific fees.

As in the Spring 2020 semester, our expectation is that, with few exceptions, students will participate in synchronous class sessions, with classes set to record as the default option and a link available if needed for students who are unable to attend. There may be some instances when, for reasons related principally to speakers and confidentiality or specific class pedagogy, faculty may determine that recording is infeasible for a specific class; course syllabi will provide more detail about these situations. When the semester begins, please contact your faculty member if you are unable to find a class recording; for technical issues, please contact the Help Desk. The Student Suggestion Box remains open for feedback about Zoom.

The University has directed students to contact keeplearning@duke.edu with questions about access to electronic devices and/or internet beyond Duke’s campus.

If this applies to you, please also contact Student Affairs so that we can determine the scope of the problem and adjust our response accordingly. One possible solution for those eligible for federal loans is to contact the Financial Aid Office to request a budget increase to permit you to borrow additional loan funds in order to establish better internet service at home. If you are ineligible to borrow federal loans, please still contact the Financial Aid Office to discuss other options.

We would very much like to be able to offer more courses in-person next spring. Our ability to do that, however, is largely outside our control, as it will be determined by safety considerations. We, along with our colleagues at the University and other schools around the country and the world, are learning how to live with a highly contagious virus and developing strategies through masking, social distancing, and cleaning to mitigate its effects. We hope that the experience we have together this fall in managing the situation will help us to expand on our in-person offerings in the spring. That said, if you would prefer to take classes exclusively online in the spring, we will find ways for you to do so even if we have more in-person options available.

For the Classes of 2021 and 2022, we will provide further information in the coming weeks about how Rule 2-7 will apply. We are committed to ensuring that any students otherwise eligible for honors would not be cut off from consideration due to the threshold for graded credits, based solely on the effect of Spring 2020’s ungraded coursework.

As always, you should check with the bar examiners in the state where you plan to sit for the exam, but we have reviewed all 50 states and found that, with the exception of New York, shifting to remote learning and C/NC grading will not affect our JD graduates’ ability to sit for the bar exam. For LLM graduates taking bar exams in states other than New York, please contact Jabrina Robinson in the International Studies office.

The Law School has applied for, and received, a waiver of strict compliance with the distance education limitations of Section 520.3 and 520.6 of the Rules for the Admission of Attorneys and Counselors at Law for New York. Upon satisfying New York’s Rules in other respects, including proof of a degree from Duke Law, our JD and LLM graduates will be permitted to sit for the New York bar exam.

Please visit the University’s dedicated Coronavirus Response site. Please also check your email often and read all emails from the University, law school, and your professors in their entirety.

Common signs of infection include fever, cough, shortness of breath, and breathing difficulties. Please refer to the CDC site for more detailed information.

This fall, students who will be coming to the Law School building will be required to do daily symptom monitoring via a system developed by the University, with clear instructions about next steps to follow if they are experiencing any of the above symptoms, or more common symptoms such as a headache, sore throat, or runny nose.

If you are in Durham and ill with the symptoms outlined above, you will be directed to contact Student Health at 919-681-9355, option 2 and ask to speak to a triage nurse. If you are diagnosed with COVID-19, please contact Student Health and Dean Gustafson (gustafson@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7229) so that Duke may take appropriate measures to safeguard the University community and provide you any support you may need.

Before the start of the Fall 2020 semester, we will provide additional, more detailed guidance about the safety protocols to follow for symptom monitoring, possible exposure, quarantine requirements, and other measures to keep our community safe for those who are in Durham.

If you are elsewhere, please contact your primary care provider or the local public health authorities for additional guidance.

Make sure you follow the guidance for protecting yourself and staying healthy issued by the University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Both pages are updated frequently with the latest information.

Physical distancing and other mitigation strategies to reduce exposure, slow the spread, and minimize the transmission of COVID-19 remain important—and yes, please follow the tips to wear a mask, maintain distance between yourself and others who aren’t members of your household, and to avoid shaking hands or close physical contact with anyone displaying symptoms. Follow the guidance to wash your hands, and avoid touching your face. These measures are important to follow not just if you want to access the Law School, but all the time, regardless of where you are. Please continue to remain vigilant and play your part in keeping yourself, your loved ones, your colleagues, and your community healthy.

And, stay in touch! In Durham or elsewhere, we hope that we can continue to maintain the sense of community that makes Duke Law special. Your mental health is just as important as your physical wellness, and being in contact with us and each other is a critical part of staying healthy. Continue to connect via your GroupMe and WhatsApp groups, set up regular (even if remote!) study sessions, get outside and away from a screen as much as you’re able, check in on each other by phone, text, and e-mail, and please contact Student Affairs, faculty, or other administrators if you learn of a friend or classmate who needs our help. This continues to be an uncertain time, and we can do a lot to ease each other’s stress and anxiety simply by continuing to be present for each other, even in new or different ways.

If there are academic advising questions we have not addressed, please contact Dean Lacoff or James Lambert to ask about your particular situation.