Final Examination
The Exam. This exam is TAKE-HOME AND FULLY open-book. You may consult any materials you deem appropriate. You may orally discuss this examination with anyone you wish, including your classmates and the instructor. PROVIDED HOWEVER THAT: You may not show your written answer or a draft thereof to anyone, nor may you receive any assistance from anyone in writing the answer. You may not coordinate your answers with any classmate, your work must be original. I will not answer questions about the examination after our class on November 23, 1999.
DUE DATE. You can keep this exam, you only need to turn in your answer. Your answer must be turned in to the Office of Career Services in Brutton-Geer Hall on or before MONDAY, December 6, 1999 at 5:00 p.m. You may turn in your answer before the due date, at your discretion. In order to ensure the anonymous nature of our grading, the Office of Student Affairs has devised this system for exam collection. Therefore, the Office of Career Services will collect exam answers during their regular hours of 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.
USE EXAM NUMBERS ONLY. DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR NAME IN THE ANSWERS, USE YOUR EXAMINATION NUMBERS ONLY. Each page of your answerS must bear your EXAMINATION NUMBER. Because the exams are collected by career services, be sure to include our course name, and my name on the first page of your answer, to ensure that the document is routed properly.
Graduating Seniors. Students who will graduate at the end of this semester should write "graduating senior" next to their exam number on each page.
Honor Code. By turning in your answer, you certify that: (1) you have neither received nor given any aid beyond the allowed use of materials and oral discussion; (2) that your work is original and is in no way improperly copied from any source; and (3) you have complied with all applicable instructions and rules, including, but not limited to, those set forth herein and in the University of Florida College of Law Student Honor Code.
LIMITED LENGTH OF ANSWER. Your answer should be printed on letter-sized paper, in double spaced lines, with a left margin of no less than two (2) inches (I use the left margin to write grading notes, hence the need to have that margin be a bit larger) and one (1) inch margins for those remaining. Typeface should be 12-14 points. You may write no more than 3,000 words. Use the "word-count" feature of your word processor to certify the length of your answer, and print it at the end of your paper. Everything must be included in the word count, unless expressly excepted. Everything means everything: footnotes, citations, parentheticals must be included. The ONLY exception is the Bibliography page that I suggest you use. You should not transcribe the question with your answer.
ANSWERS GENERALLY. Because of its format, this exam is quite different from similar questions that I have asked in the past. Nevertheless I encourage you to look at the old exam questions and my feedback memoranda. However, let me emphasize that you are required to provide more comparative examples and more analysis than would be required in closed book, time-limited exam. This analysis should show your command of the material you learned in class. In drafting your answers, please keep in mind that I want you to do three things:
(1) Show that you have a command of the material we covered in class that is pertinent to your answer. To this end, provide references to our casebook, handouts, and to your notes of our class discussion. References should be simple and straight-forward. Page numbers for our casebook, accompanied by the prefix "CB-", e.g., page 111 in our casebook is "CB-111". The date of a class session is enough to identify your notes, and the title of the handout enough description thereof. I recommend that you use parentheticals to give substantive information in a short format. Additionally, I recommend that you use a bibliography to make references to any source(s) you choose to use. That way, you can give me the detailed bibliographical information, and you can use a short form of citation in the text. You can exclude the bibliography from your word count.
(2) Show that you can identify analogous American legal concepts and materials that are the proper subject of comparative analysis. This may require you to conduct some modest research outside our class materials. Please keep it simple. I believe that most research can be limited to your first-year casebooks and materials. However, you may use anything you deem appropriate including electronic research systems.
(3) Finally, you should discuss the factual or legal factors disclosed by your research in a thoughtful and original manner that shows your command of the material related to our course.
QUESTION
At the beginning of the course, I showed you a list of six sub-traditions of the Civil Law Tradition: (1) Roman Law, (2) Canon Law, (3) Commercial Law, (4) The Revolution, (5) Legal Science and (6) Modern Constitutionalism. The first five come from our casebook authors, the last one, Constitutionalism, is my own. I purposely did not cover the Commercial Law and Legal Science, therefore, you may completely ignore those categories in preparing your exam answer.
As to the four sub-traditions that we did cover: (1) Roman Law; (2) Canon Law, (3) The Revolution and (4) Modern European Constitutionalism, explain how each contributes to the legal structure of the Modern Western European State and how that compares to our own legal system. I want you to focus on the end-product, i.e., what do the legal systems of Western Europe look like today, and how each sub-tradition has contributed to that end result. In writing your answer, you should focus on the legal systems of Germany, France, Spain, and, for comparative purposes, the United States of America.