Contract Drafting

This section of contract drafting will explore foundational transactional skills of negotiating a real estate contract, as well as reading, editing, and interpreting any kind of formal agreement. Students work in pairs in the role of either a landowner or a Native American non-profit organization in a hypothetical landback transaction. They start with a template from a landbank contract in which a landowner transferred land to a Native American non-profit as do-it-yourself reparations. In a series of assignments, students negotiate and draft the Donation Agreement and its exhibits to make the agreement legally binding. In addition students learn the foundational skill of tailoring an agreement to a cultural context by integrating Indigenous legal traditions into the transaction (by, for example, Indigenous-centered dispute resolution provisions) . Students learn how to structure and format the contract, write to maximize clarity, and allocate risk between the parties as the transaction proceeds. Student-created portfolios provide a writing sample for employers that seek familiarity with a common business transaction, the contract concepts it implicates, and how to reduce agreed-upon terms to words on the page.

Pre-requisite: Contracts; Property