Sorry to bump an old thread, I'm not sure if you're an alumni of the law center, or know someone that attends currently or has attended, but getting out of the DCL program w/ less than 2 civil law based classes is false.

Students are not able to opt out of the DCL program until their second year, by then first year students will have taken three civil law based courses (four if you want to count torts, as La torts is analyzed differently from common law torts):

-Legal Traditions: Louisiana's Experience
-Obligations
-Civil Law Property

The Legal Traditions course is interesting, but it has absolutely ZERO bearing on anything should a student choose to not practice in Louisiana (it's very poorly justified by professors as a required 3hr credit course, imo.), the central focus of the course is the impact of Roman law and Anglo-American law on Louisiana legal system. It's simply a history course. It's really interesting, don't get me wrong, and I personally did well in the class, but it should not be a 3hr REQUIRED 1L course, at all. I don't even think it's applicable even if you want to stay in Louisiana.

Obligations is the Civil law of conventional
obligations including certain aspects of the contract of
donation; classification of contracts; consent; offer and
acceptance; vices of consent and lesion; cause; effect of
obligations; damages; conditions; proof, discharge and quasicontracts;
including comparative point of view; Roman and
French materials. In plain terms, it's civil law contracts, and..just not relevant.

Civil law property, again, includes things, ownership, usufruct, servitudes,
occupancy, possession, prescription. This is probably very relevant if one chooses to stay and practice in Louisiana, but for an out of stater, it isn't.

As an out-of-state, minority student currently attending LSU Law, I have every intention to return home to Texas, and I will have to waste an upperclassmen course in the fall to take common law property since it's on the Texas bar, if I had a common law track, I could've used that course to take something else of interest to me (like antitrust law or something)

Not having a common law track for students like myself and many others that do not intend to practice in Louisiana, loading up first year students with pointless courses like legal traditions, obligations, etc. (Tulane 1Ls take 4 doctrinal courses plus LRW both fall and spring and are not forced to take obligations and may instead take contracts 2), lack of research materials in the library is what is going to prevent LSU from becoming an elite law school, and lack of out of state attendees gives a prospective student from the outside looking in that LSU law is a very insular place that doesn't welcome out of staters, especially minorities like myself. (I had this impression my first semester and didn't feel welcome, at all.)

It has the name, the LSU pedigree is one thing that attracted me to the school, and the potential is there, but hiding behind budget cuts from the state and emphasizing how much they're doing with little funding can only be stretched so much when internal changes such as the changes to the curriculum above can be made without relying on gov't funding and just a matter of meeting as a faculty to make the changes.

And no, I'm not at the bottom of my class with no job lined up so I'm complaining about the curriculum because I didn't beat the curve. I do believe LSU can rise to becoming a Top 50 or even beyond that, but things like the points above are hampering it from doing so, and need to be taken into serious consideration and addressed.

It's only a "bargain" to me as an out-of-stater b/c of the massive scholarship I got, other than that, at or near sticker I don't think it's a bargain at all. But, they have to hike it up due to budget cuts from the state, I understand that. But, they're not looking closely internally cogs hampering the program from becoming what it could potentially be.