- A student may take one Independent Study (LWIND 996) course per semester.
- An Independent Study course may be for one, two or three credits.
- An Independent Study course does not satisfy the Seminar requirement for graduation.
- A student may register for no more than two Independent Study courses for a maximum of four (4) credits.
- A student may take an Independent Study only from a Supervising Professor. A Supervising Professor must be a resident law faculty member, an emeritus faculty member, or (with Associate Dean for Academic Affairs approval) an affiliate faculty member with a JD. Adjunct professors are not within this definition. Graduate level Individual Studies (596) credits will not be applied to the J.D. degree
- Before a student may register for an Independent Study course, the student must submit a written course proposal to the Supervising Professor. The course proposal must state the student's goals for the course and propose a thesis for the research paper the student will produce as part of the course. The Supervising Professor must approve the course proposal.
- Each Supervising Professor sets his or her standards and expectations each student must satisfy for course credit. A Supervising Professor may not award credit for an Independent Study unless the student produces a written research paper that reflects learning and achievement that merit award of course credit. Normally, to meet this standard, a student should expect to produce at least twenty double-spaced letter size pages of high quality legal scholarship for each credit awarded for the course.
Note: A student may not earn academic credit more than once for the same or similar work (“double-dipping”). For example, a student may not submit the same or similar work to satisfy the requirements for membership on a law journal and for credit in a seminar course or independent study. See Penn State Law Honor Code Appendix 12 (defining “plagiarism” as including “the re-submission of work originally completed for another course . . .” ).