The Ripple Effect of

Abstract

Most of the current debates over adding a mandatory legislation administration course to the law school curriculum rightly focus on the need for and value of such a course, or on what traditional core course(s) the so-called "leg-reg" course might replace. Less often investigated, however-and the subject of this article-is the question of how "leg-reg" might affect preexisting or future upper-level offerings in legislation and administrative law. Also rarely probed is the question of whether the impact on the two fields is the same. Given that legislation is the younger and less-entrenched field, this author has long wondered whether the recently developed upper-level legislation course "survives" leg-reg to the same degree that upper-level administrative law may survive. If it does not, one has to evaluate whether reaching more students through leg-reg is worth what may be lost in the reduction of more complex upper-level offerings. These questions should be of great interest not only to leg-reg's detractors but also to its proponents, who must balance considerations of breadth, i.e., reaching the most students, and depth, i.e., how much can be taught to first-year law students in a course that combines element of two black-letter courses in their own right.