Professor Huppin is an amazing professor! During lectures, you can tell that he really enjoys teaching the material and cares for his students. There were three thought papers, which were only 2 pages long. I thought they were pretty easy, seeing that you had to make an argument on a court case he assigned for that paper. There's only one timed midterm. He posted the midterm in the beginning of class and we had to turn it in before class ended. I thought the midterm was fairly easy if you had good notes on lecture and read the court case articles. The midterm consisted of a multiple choices and short answer questions. The final was similar to the midterm, but with more short answers. He assigns multiple of readings and supplemental reading for the court cases each week. If you attend lecture, read the articles, and study the powerpoints you should be fine.

[spring 2020 covid online quarter] Once Huppin subbed for one of my classes in Winter quarter I knew I had to take him. He was fantastic but I'll wager he would have been better in person. His teaching style revolves around asking students to discuss and critically think about the cases and legal debate issues he brings up in class. The same 10 students out of 100 ended up being the only ones talking week to week (you bet I was in the 90). He places an emphasis on showing up to class and engaging yourself (he only sent class recordings to students in other timezones/good reason for missing, he didn't post it for your general review/replay). If you don't listen and take notes, you will miss things, and his slides purposely only guide his lecture and cannot be relied on to help you study. That being said, idk if was because of that, or because of his engaging, very human and sensitive approach to the new circumstances of this quarter, % class attendance was really high every time. He also adjusted the class to talk about current events with COVID and BLM and stuff, very take it as you go guy.
There was a good amount of reading, which I didn't do very sincerely, but if you do scan over it, it lines up with the lectures pretty well and will help you do well on the tests. (Ah, I remember he said he usually assigns a course reader which I assume would be $$ but this quarter he uploaded everything online so I escaped paying for that ig, nice.) He also assigned 2 movies which were a good time, 8/10 (also gave us off class on the days we should watch those on our own, I think he usually shows them in class).
Grade was based on two tests. The questions to be honest weren't very straight-proceeding from the class material and really wanted to see whether you were thinking, which I think should be the point of school, but made it hard to figure out what to say in order to get the points.
In all, definitely take this class, but know that Huppin's teaching style almost certainly suits in-person the best.

Going in I was pretty excited about this class but Prof Huppin’s inability to keep the class moving became super frustrating. He ended up cutting out a lot of material from his syllabus because we got so far behind. The same 10ish people would constantly raise their hands which slowed us down and a lot of people would send in chat questions and he would take every single question rather than just moving on so we could get through the material. This ended up kind of hurting us in my opinion because we had only covered about 3 topics by the time we had to take the midterm so I felt like he was stretching out so few topics across the midterm by making some of the questions either really specific and hard or by asking us things we never talked about in class. A lot of his test questions are very long and wordy which was a little difficult with the time limit, I ended up submitting 1 minute before the deadline for both tests. Other than my complaints about his time management, I liked his teaching style and the class was always interesting. He also made sure to make himself available outside of class to talk about the midterm which I appreciated. Besides a midterm and a final we had to do 3 thought papers, each 3 pages long. The topics were pretty interesting and they were graded leniently, basically no one got less than 9/10 if you did the work. Overall I would recommend this class especially if you are interested in law but it was disappointing to me that we didn’t get to cover a bunch of interesting topics because he allowed way too much participation.

Interesting class but the exam can be hard if you don't do the readings well because some exme questions can be very detail and tricky.

I learned a lot from this class about law, and I felt like Huppin was a pretty straightforward lecturer who tried hard to make lecture engaging. He seems really serious at first, but you'll see his chill side if you go to office hours. Additionally, he remembers peoples name, which I feel like makes a big difference.

Your grade is comprised of 2 Papers (each 10%-which really help buffer your grade) and a midterm (40%) and final (40%). The papers were fun to write, and I feel like they were graded fairly. The midterm was a little difficult for me, but that's because I had 4 other finals in one week, so I wasn't able to devote as much time to studying as I needed to. The final ended up being online because of COVID-19, and it was exactly like the midterm in terms of the types of questions.

The readings need to be completed if you want to get an A because he asks a lot of multiple choice questions from them. The reading is manageable, but if you get behind one week, it'll suck catching up. Even if you do the readings, if you don't understand how to apply the laws, you'll probably get a B. Also, he mentions things in lecture that aren't on his slides that end up on the test, so I definitely recommend showing up and taking detailed notes.

I do think he slightly curves the class, which brought me from an A- to an A, which I am extremely appreciative of. Overall, if you're up to put in some work, I would definitely recommend this class.

Course Reader: **********

Selling course reader 9th edition. Just used for Winter 2020. Text at ********** if you'd like to buy it, $25. Not highlighted except for a few pages.

Selling the reader for this class! Text me at **********.

Hello! I have a reader for cheap from Winter 2019. Email me at ************* to get it!

This class requires a lot of work, but it's very rewarding and I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you have the slightly bit of interest in the law, I think you'll like it too. He discusses very interesting and controversial topics like the right to die, the right to abortion, freedom of religion and others. There are a lot of Supreme Court readings you need to get through that you cannot leave till the last minute. If you study and understand the concepts and the legal rationale behind them, you shouldn't find the midterm or final challenging at all. It is mostly questions discussing why a certain case had a certain outcome, and one semi-essay question where you get a hypothetical scenario and you need to apply the concepts you learned in class. You get to watch movies and interesting videos and have really rich discussions in class! The professor is also pretty objective and doesn't bring in his own personal opinions to class, which is pretty refreshing at UCLA.