UVa plans seminar on f inancial crisis

A group of University of Virginia students will get an education in the current global financial crisis through a new seminar at the law school.

The seminar, which will be offered to third- and fourth-year law students and students who are getting a law degree and a master’s of business administration, will attempt to give students a big-picture look at how the crisis began and where it could be going.

Law professors George Geis and Edmund Kitch, who are co-advisers to the J.D.-M.B.A Program, came up with the spring 2010 class as a capstone course for their combined-degree students.

“We’ve done a lot with short courses, but there wasn’t a final class for students to round out their degree,” Geis said.

The J.D.-M.B.A Program condenses three years of law school and two years of business school into four years. About 20 students are enrolled in the program.

Kitch said the seminar would be helpful to the UVa-educated lawyers, who often need a working knowledge of the financial markets because they advise clients about them.

“The regulations are changing and they need to understand the background and framework,” Kitch said. “[For the J.D.-M.B.A. students,] the financial markets are the key to the business world. [Those students] can bring understanding in business and law to the topics because both are involved.”

The weekly seminar will begin with an introduction to the crisis to pave the way for more specific subjects such as the automotive industry’s bailout. Geis and Kitch said they would leave time to discuss new situations.

“We want to gather materials on a variety of different contexts, how the problems unfold, what are the responses and move forward and talk about what should be the responses,” Geis said.

A J.D.-M.B.A. student is spending the summer finding those materials for the course. Christopher Dass, who finished his first year of law school in the spring and was recently accepted to the J.D.-M.B.A Program, said he has been combing through scholarly and news articles for the seminar.

Dass said he has tried to keep up with the financial crisis, but doing research for the seminar has helped him understand how the pieces of the recession have come together.

“It has been a humbling experience,” Dass said. “Going through this, you realize how much you don’t know.”

Geis said students in the seminar would produce weekly position papers to encourage critical thinking about the global financial crisis. The professors are thinking about adding forward-looking cases to the course, which would put students in the shoes of a company such as Bear Stearns and have them make decisions based on fact patterns. Geis said he and Kitch also could sponsor a one-credit independent study for students who want to extend an idea from class into a paper.

About 17 students will be accepted into the seminar. Geis said the state of the economy will determine if the course will be offered more than once.