I was lost from almost the beginning. I'm not sure if this is part 2 of a course or if this is meant for people who have already attended law school. I also found the swaying back and forth of the professor to be a bit distracting.

The reading material was WAY more than 10 minutes. I found myself spending an hour or two reading for each assignment. That was a little frustrating as the suggested reading time was listed as 10 minutes.

I'm attending law school in the fall and was hoping to get a primer. But this class definitely disappointed me. Perhaps I'll revise it after my first year is complete.

Although there is likely little Yale/Cousera can do about privacy and accountability within the Coursera platform, I hope to leave a brief note about the issue I encountered during the course.

After peer-grading the Substantive vs Procedural Law Assignment, I received a highly vulgar email from, I am assuming, an author who received a low grade from me. This was sent to my work email (michelle.liu@uwaterloo.ca), which is not associated to my Coursera account and not listed in my Coursera profile. I was under the impression that peer-review feedback would only be accompanied by the name of the reviewer and not their profile picture. This individual, I suspect, used my name in combination with my profile picture to seek out my identity and workplace information, which significantly impacted my otherwise pleasant experience with this course.

The individual used "Boss Blitzer" as the sender name, and signed the email content with the name "Frank Hassle," neither of which Coursera could trace to an enrolled student in the course. The email address the individual used was c0ke.steam@hotmail.ca, which was also untraceable.

I realize there is little you can do, but I hope this feedback can inform future changes of the Coursera platform, for Yale courses and in general.

This course was required by my director, but it is not for those who have no background in law (which was the case for the group of us at CDC who were required to take this). It was very difficult to iuinderstand and I did not think it was a "beginner's course for no

I enjoyed this course but you really need to have some legal background to get the most out of it. The assignments were worth the time they took and I learned a lot trying to grade my fellow students.

TL/DR: If you can get through it, its content might come in handy later, but look for other lecturers.

I'm a social justice nerd, with a Bachelors in Sociology, and ten months into a paralegal studies program, or as I like to refer to it, "law school beta". I took this course as a means to continue to do something productive while in this coronavirus quarantine state we're all under right now. Keep the mind active while in-between school quarters. This course was tough to get through at times. Took me 2x as long as the "three weeks" it claims to get through it, in part because I lost interest to sit through it at the pace it it proposes. The lectures are dry to listen to. The professor stumbles through his words, goes off on anecdotal tangents that aren't particularly helpful, and his attempts at humor and pop culture fall flat. The topics the lectures are super pertinent for any would-be legal professional, but his explanations often leave you having to Google or find other videos to clarify what he actually might have meant. The videos aren't particularly stimulating visually to maintain interest, and it's clear that there were some bumps in coordinating between the teleprompter, the slideshow, and the camera. If nothing else, the course serves as a helpful primer that not all law professors are going to be helpful in how they lecture, and that your success on the material is often in spite of the professor you have.

The most challenging part of the course was probably the readings and peer review assignments. Some readings are in excess of 30 pages, so the "10 minutes" that it says it should take you to read are grossly underestimated. Also, part of the assignment's grading is whether you can articulate these responses in under 250 words. That's basically trying to summarize complex legal principles or case law in a tweet. Most "classmates" wrote well excess of the prompt, averaging 320-450 words. Some of your peers are gonna grade tough, but offered great feedback for strengthening your argument or correct your incorrect premise. Others I'm pretty sure are those "atta boy" graders who just give everyone A's for effort. However, there were a number of peer reviews that I read that helped me make greater sense of the readings than I may have had on first impression.

In all, it took me about 24 hours to take detailed handwritten notes, skim the readings, and complete the prompts or roughly 3-4 hours a week. I would have liked if the course had been broken up into 4-5 weeks versus 3, and had perhaps some guest speakers, or varying content like supplemental videos instead of the very mediocre lectures in a dark studio and an under-prepared lecturer.

I think its a best course to those who want to study law and legal studies.

Great teaching style, creates , incites a student to their potential, any person, even ones merely venturing into new, or unknown areas will broaden their perspective of their inherent heretofore unknown potentials. Literally anyone that takes this course is very lucky.

It covers enough that you will have a feel for if you will hate law or not. You learn far more from peer review than you would think. Everything is marked on time (though rarely too early, so do not stress about getting ahead, but also do not hand things in late - as marking happens as people hand in their own work usually.). Resubmitting option allows you to grapple with concepts, rather than cram memory.

And there is free financial advice at the end. Which is reasonable. It is in the outtakes, but worth a mention. It could be twice as long ans cover a few more concepts, but it is a great primer for anyone with no formal legal coursework under their belt.

I am hopeful that the information I've learned in this course will show its usefulness in the future. I feel that the course could've been organized a little better (and if I had it to do over I would check out the Reading a Case very early on in the course.) As a teacher, I am disappointed at the rubric that is given because students are grading each other and may not know what an "average" response is I feel that the rubric should be better structured to help give a more objective grade.

The course is gorgeous!!! Although I am an experienced lawyer in my country it was an excellent training for my brains, more over, the lectures were really very interesting!!! Strongly recommended!!!

The course was great!!

I found this course extremely useful. It requires a lot of extra work; readings can be sometimes very long and dense, and I often had to pause and search for additional materials to help me better comprehend ideas and concepts covered in this class. However, this course introduced some of the most important ideas I can use in future legal studies. Highly recommend! Also, be sure to watch the bonus video!

It was a very good course. It was not only a legal course, but also a course concerned with economic thinking and logic thinking about what law is and why law is. I am a practicing lawyer. The course widen my eyes on legal matters and makes me think more deeply than before. It should be strongly recommend for legal students and legal professionals.

A challenging and insightful course. The only downside is that it had to end. Excellent professor with engaging videos, in-depth analysis, peer graded assignments and just a good overall course.

Really interesting course, quite intense, especially in week 1. Good instructor who engages students (quite a feat for an online course) and encourages one to think about law in different ways.

This Toolkit has come very much in handy for my Paralegal Training, and other real life situations.

Excellent course to get an approach on what is studied in Law undergraduate courses in the USA.

nice learning experience

Solid 5

great

Very well structure course. It is impressive how such a vast variety of material was covered in such short time frame. Even though some parts of it were focused solely towards american jurisprudence, it was generalized enough for students from all jurisdictions to gain something out of. I do however wish there was a little more quiz type testing and a little less american jurisprudence related testing.

Not very satisfied. The course did not seem so well organized as others I attended, and the quizzes and tests were meaningless... I'd rather if the content were organized into six lessons, with optional peer-graded tasks, and a mandatory quiz at the end of the lesson, with an exhaustive final test. I may be traditionalist, but I really do not see the use of this.

I'm getting queasy watching him sway back and forth--and since the links to the reading material are broken, I don't even know what I'm missing.

A waste of time.

this court is very compact......this professor usually put lots and lots of stuff into a FOUR MINUTES lecture, and for every of his lecture, you got like four HOURS of reading.....also the classmates of this course are like half academic pendant snobs in stating their opinion.....the benefit is they push you to come up with better and more convincing arguments.......it would be better if the professor don't speak like a robot or like reading from a prompter....

I love Ian Ayres. Thank you Ian, for starting off my law degree on firm foundations and providing the intellectual kindling for my future learning. You are welfome round at my dinner table, anytime.