Professor Prentiss Cox ’90 had been ruminating on how to improve the 1L experience when a comment from a student – who was also a medical doctor — crystallized his thinking. “He told me that the way we taught law school was akin to medical students learning how to treat patients by walking around the hospital and reading charts instead of first learning how the body works,” says Cox.
Cox decided to address that disconnect between the typical course content and what a student actually needs to pass the bar and successfully practice law. Over the past few years, he has created and refined a new 1L civil procedure course to test his theory.
Cox was also the primary creator of Law in Practice, a Law School course taken by all 1L students in the spring. He says that the civil procedure materials are based on the same core principle underlying Law in Practice: that law is best understood when seen in the context of its use in practice.
“The point is to teach in a more direct, efficient, and effective way,” Cox says. “The focus is on problem-solving rather than reading cases. The typical 1L class asks students to read a textbook with dozens of appellate cases and then dissect these cases. Reading case law is one skill but we act like it’s the only one. I believe students will do better if they first understand how the law is structured and how it works in practice.”
Cox’s civil procedure course does not use a casebook; instead, he has created materials that are available for free and will be published in 2025 on an open-source platform. The course is broken into three units: The first introduces the mechanics of civil litigation and asks students to apply rules to given facts to reach a definitive legal conclusion. The second unit moves the study of civil procedure to other sources of law, pairing district court opinions with similar facts and different outcomes to teach how courts think about decision-making and to help students learn how to make arguments.
The final unit offers a substantial number of skill-building exercises, such as drafting a compelling complaint and developing a proof plan. “Civil procedures fade into the background intentionally in this unit,” he says. “We couple left-brain identification of uncertain elements in a claim with its right-brain cousin of building a narrative.”
Noah Madoff ’26 found significant value in the course. “1L is about battling your way through the foundational cases, but Professor Cox instead chose to have us dive into the literal rule book that everybody uses for civil procedure,” he says. “We learned to read the rules, learn the rules, then apply them to the simulation. The problem sets took a lot of time at first and were sometimes maddening, but by the end, I felt like I had a really firm and practical grasp of this area of law. It was beyond valuable.”
The course helped prepare Bex Warner ’26 for her summer position as a judicial intern at the U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota. “Professor Cox’s course was what really taught me what most lawyering actually looks like, as opposed to the typical appellate cases read in other courses,” she says. “The course really does a great job of teaching a new law student how to think about a potential case.”
Building confidence was a major outcome for Kyle Fluker ’26. “The class is taught very differently than other courses. Professor Cox uses daily questions that lead you to where you need to learn the material. We didn’t have to look at 30 cases to learn one rule. It was a really great approach to learn the subject.”
Cox hopes that an added bonus of shifting the 1L workload from case reading to more simulations and problem-solving may relieve the stress of law students. Fluker agrees: “If more courses were like this, students would succeed at a higher level.”