The Increasing Prominence of Transactional Law

Over the past two decades, law schools have paid increasing attention to the study and teaching of transactions. Business Planning has long been the flagship transactional course in most law schools. Recently, however, many law schools have introduced additional transactional courses to their curricula or integrated transactions into traditional law school courses, such as Contracts and Business Associations. In addition, law professors have begun to produce more transactional scholarship, studying the structure of contractual relationships, or process through which those relationships are formed.

One recent sign of the new prominence of transactions in legal education was the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Mid-year Workshop on Transactional Law, which attracted law professors from across the U.S. to Long Beach, California on June 10-12, 2009. The Workshop was the culmination of almost three years of work by Professor Gordon Smith, in collaboration with many law professors around the country.

The project started with a short blog post in October 2006 entitled "Training Dealmakers in Law School" by University of Georgia Law Professor Usha Rodrigues. That post inspired Professor Smith to write a response, which concluded with a suggestion for a transactional conference. Professor Darian Ibrahim of the University of Wisconsin Law School followed the same day with another blog post endorsing a conference on transactional law, and the idea started to gain momentum. A number of other law professors also liked the idea and, together with Professors Smith, Rodrigues, and Ibrahim, they formed an ad hoc drafting committee.

The AALS approved the proposal in the summer of 2007, and Professor Smith was appointed to the Workshop’s Planning Committee. That Committee defined “transactional law” as “the various substantive legal rules that influence or constrain planning, negotiating, and document drafting in connection with business transactions, as well as the ‘law of the deal’ (i.e., the negotiated contracts) produced by the parties to those transactions.”

Posted: October 08, 2009