• The maximum summer credit load is 7 credits.
• Please be aware that although summer-course credits obviously count toward your graduation requirement of 88 credits, you still must satisfy UST Law’s 6-semester residency requirement (policy here) in order to graduate. Summer courses can be helpful in enabling you to reduce your course load in future semesters, but they cannot enable you to graduate early. If you come to your sixth semester with fewer than 12 credits remaining to graduate and obtain the permission of the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, you may take fewer than 12 credits (but no fewer than 8 credits) and still count that semester toward your residency requirements.

• Client Interviewing and Counseling – 12
• Judicial Externship – 12
• Negotiation – 12 (two sections of 12 each)
• Public Interest Externship – 12

The following courses have special registration materials or procedures.  You will not be able to register for them online.

• Judicial Externship: Instructions here; for more information, contact Dean Brabbit.
• Public Interest Externship: Instructions here;  or for more information contact Sara Sommarstrom.

• Full tuition scholarships/fellowships are available to cover UST law tuition (including Rome Program) in the summer.  Partial scholarships (i.e. Dean’s Scholarships) are not available for summer classes.
• The definition of half-time status for summer (making one eligible for federal student loans) is 3 credits. Contact Chad Nosbusch with all questions about financial aid.

Required Credits and Courses for Graduation

• 2L students: Remember to take Lawyering Skills III in the spring if you did not take it in the fall.
• 3L students: Carefully review your number of credits and your required courses, including the upper-level writing requirement and public service hours, to be sure you will satisfy all graduation requirements. You need 88 credits to graduate.
• NOTE: You will receive an email before registration providing you with the course number of your specific Mentor Externship section. You are responsible for registering for your own Mentor course. Four semesters of Mentor Externship are required to graduate.

Course Load and Residency Requirements:

• See Policy III-A-2 for the maximum and minimum number if credits for which you may register, and for the residency requirements for graduation.
• REMEMBER: The required Mentor Externship course (1 credit per year) is now registered as 0 credits in the fall and 1 credit in the spring. Mentor Externship therefore will count 1 credit toward your course load this spring.

Please PAY ATTENTION to prerequisites (marked with Xs in Class Finder).  You will not be permitted to register for a course without having completed the prerequisite(s). NOTE that required upper-level courses (Business Associations, Evidence, Professional Responsibility, and Lawyering Skills III) are prerequisites for a number of elective courses and externships. 

The Policy Manual explains the Upper-Level Writing requirement.  Some courses entail papers that may be used to satisfy the requirement: Complex Litigation (Mengler), Feminist Jurisprudence (Schiltz), the Great Books seminar (Reid), and Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy (Fr. Griffith).  Professors in other courses may also allow you to expand a paper to satisfy the writing requirement.  You should check with individual professors about the possibility.  In addition, the requirement may be satisfied through Supervised Research and Writing, which is governed by Policy III-B-4. Please read and follow it carefully.  Note that you must have the supervising faculty member’s written permission before registering for Supervised Research.  

• Upper Level Writing registration approval Form. (Return to Jill Akervik)

To help you in course planning for your legal-practice interest, and to link you to UST Law faculty and other resources for particular subject areas and practice areas, visit the pages on the website in the “Academics” section.  The pages are in the areas of: To help you in course planning for your legal-practice interest, and to link you to UST Law faculty and other resources for particular subject areas and practice areas, visit the pages on the website in the “Academics” section.  The pages are in the areas of:

• Business and Corporate Law 
• Criminal Law
• General Practice
• Global and Comparative Law
• Civil Litigation and Dispute Resolution
• Public Interest Law 

DON’T NEGLECT courses that may sound “dry,” but that are essential to legal practice.  For example, read Professor Gene Hennig’s explanation of why his Secured Transactions course is so important.  Another example is our new Energy Law Practicum, which allows students to work with one of the most experienced energy law attorneys in the region on the type of projects that are in demand in a rapidly growing regulatory field.

To prevent overcrowding of wait lists, each student will be allowed to place himself/herself on a wait list for only two courses that have otherwise closed; if you place yourself on more, you will be removed from them.  You cannot move yourself from a waitlist into a course.  If a spot opens up in a course, Jill Akervik will contact you by e-mail and you will have 24 hours to respond before she offers the spot to the next person on the list. Waitlists will be processed weekly. 

Please consult the law school policy manual regarding limitations on adding and dropping courses: Information on Adding/Dropping Courses [Academic Policy Manual III-B-2] Note that a student’s ability to drop clinic or externship courses is more limited.

Should you drop a course or withdraw from the university, your tuition refund will be calculated according to the following schedule (subject to federal regulations regarding Title IV federal financial aid):

Law school policies permit you to receive credits for courses outside UST Law, but limit the number of credits permitted.  Read these policies carefully, and contact Jill Akervik or Dean Vischer with questions.

• UST Non-Law Courses Policy
• Consortium Courses at Other Twin Cities Law Schools policy 

During any semester in which you are enrolled as a full-time student, you may not engage in employment for more than 20 hours per week.  See Policy III-D-2. Do not arrange your schedule with the expectation of working more than that number.  This limitation is required by the American Bar Association, which has recently reemphasized it in reaccrediting UST Law.  We expect that you will abide by the limit.  It is also enforced through course attendance policies under which there are grading penalties for excessive absences.

If enrollment in any course following completion of registration is so low that offering the course is not justified, we may cancel the course.  We will inform each of the students who had registered for the course that it has been cancelled and will offer them an opportunity to enroll in any course for which enrollment limits have not been satisfied.