Courses

Compares public health law systems to those in other countries. Studies the goals, legal structures, and services provided, together with such issues of coercion as quarantines, monitoring, mandates and prohibitions, and forcing pharmaceutical companies to make available inexpensive generic drugs.

Investigates the sources of international human rights law and issues of jurisdiction to prescribe, adjudicate, and enforce norms. Students study treaties and reservations, customary law, declarations, resolutions, and the U.S. courts' and activists' use of materials. Topics include sovereignty and self-determination, culture, privacy, right to equality, language and speech rights, right to development, immigration, workers and globalization, and citizenship.

Explores past and present debates over the role of the legal order in economic development. Studies the relationships among economic ideas, legal ideas and the development policies pursued at the national and international level in successive historical periods, beginning in the Seventeenth Century to the present. Focuses on the potential for an alliance of various traditions from economics, law and other disciplines to understand development.

Focuses on the question of what literature can teach lawyers through a variety of literary works and films. Covers traditional works by Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Camus, Kafka, and Melville, as well as more contemporary works by Toni Morrison and Norman Mailer. Several short reflection papers, a journal, and a final paper will be required.

Introduces legal institutions engaged in social change, from courts, to Congress, to bureaucracies and organizations. Posits tension between tasks of dispute resolution and public policy development and institutional adaptations. Considers the role of public opinion and the classics of legal formalism to more critical accounts. Considers postmodern theory and empirical legal scholarship. Presents alternatives to court-centered approaches to change, including community lawyering and organizing, law and social movements, and legislation. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law students only.

Focuses on core ideas in U.S. constitutional law, such as means/ends analysis, institutional competence, rights definitions, and juridical techniques for limiting governmental powers. Draws from historical writings, contemporary press accounts, learned treatises, oral arguments, law review articles, and key judicial opinions such as Mccullough v. Maryland, Lochner v. New York, Brown v. Board of Education.

Examines issues raised by Wal-Mart's size, power, and business model. Considered issues bring numerous areas of law into play, including employment and labor law, social welfare legislation, class actions, antitrust, zoning, international labor and human rights regulation, and international trade. The course will show how different areas of the law are integrated in practice.

Reviews several regimes of compulsory labor that havebeen central to the American experience: Black chattel slavery in the antebellum South; debt peonage, criminal surety, and related institutions of agricultural involuntary servitude; convict leasing and other forms of compulsory inmate labor; "White slavery" and prostitution; and forced labor among immigrants. Emphasizes the complicated role that the law has played, and in some respects continues to play, in both supporting and undermining such institutions.

Explores the laws and economic transformations that affect labor relations on a global scale.

Explores legal, social, and economic issues arising from labor relations in the industries transporting goods and people by road, rail, air, and water, among the most critical sectors of the economy.

Contextualizes criminal law by engaging in an in depth study of the legal and social characterizations of victims and perpetrators in U.S. law, politics, and popular culture. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law students only.

Explores issues relating social class to such areas as labor relations, law enforcement, controls on radical movements, and the distribution of wealth and power. Considers problems defining social class.

Explores key ideas that have shaped American law and legal thought, such as Holmes' bad man, the Coase Theorem, the "Hunch" theory of law, and others. Focuses on researching and writing many short papers.

Introduces students to the laws and regulations that govern our food supply. The focus is federal law provided by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, with additional readings, videos and speakers. Topics to be covered include legal definitions for food, rules on food labeling, standards for food safety, biotechnology, international trade, organic and environmental regulation, hunger, farmer's markets and obesity. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law students only.

Explores the various justifications that philosophers have developed to explain why we have the right to punish. Examines the historical evolution of our punishment system and focuses on the death penalty as a critical contemporary issue in the debate about the proper role of punishment in our society.

Explores issues of equity, access, and reform in American public education, particularly as it pertains to race, including desegregation, diversity, equal protection and public education, tracking and high-stakes testing, courts or the political branches, charters and vouchers. Restricted to Law students only. Recommended prereq., LAWS 7525. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law students only.

Examines critically the possibility and character of ethical reasoning within the legal profession in light of its institutional structures. Explores descriptive/normative accounts of the profession's structure, "Professionalism," and individual conscience. Put simply, the seminar explores whether it is possible to be a good lawyer and ethical person.

Studies issues unique to the prosecution and defense of civil liberties lawsuits. Discusses litigation strategies with reference to lawsuits currently pending in the federal courts.

Draws upon various works of political theory, social theory, and jurisprudence to examine different conceptualizations of politics, power, law, and their relations.

Examines the legal framework that governs the political process, including such topics as the political question doctrine, the "Right to vote," the 2000 presidential election controversy, term limits, bicameralism and presentment, campaign finance, direct democracy, and the interpretation of the legislative product (i.e., statutes).

Explores the legal aspects of owning, managing, and participating in a successful family business system, including corporate structure, legal issues, succession planning and estate management, internal capital markets in private enterprise, ownership issues in private businesses, how lawyers can assist with family governance, planning for and managing family philanthropy, gender issues in family business, and conflict resolution. Recommended prereqs., LAWS 6104, 6157, 6211, and/or 7409.

Explores the policy, legal, and practical dynamics that drive the development and preservation of privately owned, government subsidized affordable housing. Investigates the nature of the market for housing, with particular emphasis on multifamily rental housing, and debates about market failure in that context and then outline and contrast the major regulatory responses to such market failure. Explores how subsidy programs work in practice, focusing on model documents to frame sample transactions.

Considers the work of Levi-Strauss, Steven Lukes, Pierre Bordieu, Alfred Schutz, Anthony Giddens, Culler, David Harvey, Denis Cosgrove, Michel Foucault, and Emily Martin with respect to social control and law. Focuses on the way in which social control is exercised through the organization of space, time, and the human body. Topics include consideration of meaning, intersubjectivity in the law, social construction of time, and the body as a real and cultural artifact.

Examines a variety of current issues related to American Indian Law. The topics will change to reflect the subjects that emerge at each time that the seminar is offered. Some examples of topics considered in this seminar include legal protections for American Indian religion and culture, cultural property, Tribal law, gaming law, and Native American natural and cultural resources law. Coreq., LAWS 7725.

Examines the goals, governance, norms, and ideals of American institutions of higher education, and how those policies are shaped by the legal system. Examines the legal relationship between institutions of higher education and its various constituents: faculty, presidents, governing boards, students,alumni, and staff. Spans several traditional doctrinal categories, including contract, torts, employment law, constitutional law, intellectual property, tax, and antitrust.