Logistics
Contact information
Colin.Doyle@lls.edu
Office: Burns 315
Telephone: 213-736-1148
Email is my preferred method of communication. I do not regularly check my phone voicemail. If you have something important to communicate, use email.
Please note that although you may email me substantive questions, I typically do not answer substantive questions in an individual email reply. I prefer to answer substantive questions during office hours or immediately after class. If your question is of general interest, I will share my answer with the entire class.
My faculty assistant is Colin Goward, and his email is: Colin.Goward@lls.edu
Class schedule
Fall 2023
Tuesdays & Thursdays from 8:15am to 9:30am
Hall of the 70s
Spring 2024
Wednesdays & Fridays from 8:45am to 10:00am
Hall of the 70s
Open office hours
Fall 2023
Thursdays from 1:00pm to 2:30pm
Outside the Robinson Moot Courtroom
Spring 2024
Fridays from 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Outside the Robinson Moot Courtroom
During open office hours, any student or group of students from our class may stop by without an appointment. Anyone in the class is welcome to join or leave during that time. Please know that I love office hours. While I am always up for talking about torts, I am also happy to talk about anything you’re interested in discussing: navigating law school, legal careers, the research I’m conducting when I’m not teaching, the latest season of the Great British Bakeoff — anything is fair game. My office hours are during lunchtime, so feel free to bring your lunch and eat as we chat about torts. Sometimes I’ll even have cookies or brownies to share. Show up to find out.
One-on-one office hours
By appointment in Burns 315. To schedule an appointment, email me.
Please note that open office hours are the norm, and one-on-one office hours are the exception. If you have a question about tort law or about the class itself, I recommend that you ask this question during open office hours. One-on-one office hours are available for students who cannot attend open office hours or who wish to have a private conversation.
At the beginning of the spring semester, I will host one-on-one office hours for students who would like to go over their midterm exams. A midterm review memo will be distributed along with midterm grades. I encourage all students to read through my commentary on each question and mark out on the exam the issues that you missed. Take notes on how you would rewrite your exam if given the chance. Compare your answers to the sample student answers to understand how you can better structure your answers, string together arguments, and write more precisely and succinctly. Once you have taken these review steps, I am more than happy to meet with you individually (or in groups) to go over your exams. If you finish your review of this exam and still have questions about how to approach an exam for this class, this is great timing for meeting with me one-on-one so that I can understand your approach and coach you for the final. At the start of the semester, I will put a form on our class website for students to schedule one-on-one meetings with me. Depending on the number of students who request these meetings, we may need to spread them out across the first half of the semester.
Reading Assignments
You do not need to purchase a casebook for this class.
You can download a pdf of your reading assignments here. Please note that you will need to log in to Brightspace to access this material.
To allow for this course to be flexible in response to the pace and dynamics of our in-class discussions, reading assignments will be scheduled on a rolling basis. To allow you enough time to read the assigned material, I plan to post reading assignments at least one week in advance of class. Once I have posted a reading assignment for a particular day, I will not change the assignment by adding more reading for that day.
As I assign readings to particular class dates, the reading assignments will appear both in the Reading Assignments page on this website and on a Google calendar. You can view and bookmark this calendar in a separate browser window. With a Google account, you can subscribe to the calendar with read-only access. If you subscribe to the calendar, you can turn on notifications to automatically receive an email when new reading assignments are added. Here’s how to do that:
- Open Google Calendar and locate the “Torts Reading Assignments (2022-2023)” calendar under “Other calendars.”
- Click on the three dots next to the calendar name.
- Click on “Settings”
- Add notifications for new events, changed events, and canceled events.