Courses

    Explores current issues in tax policy. Topics may include the tax legislative process, consumption taxes, taxes and distributive justice, the tax exemption for nonprofits, carbon taxes, corporate taxes and integration, and taxes and entrepreneurship. Department enforced prereq., Federal Income Tax. Prerequisites: Requires prerequisite course of LAWS 6109 (minimum grade D-). Restricted to Law (LAWS) students only.
    Develops a comprehensive description of dispute; creates a conflict assessment of the stakeholders in and dynamics of dispute; assess obstacles to and opportunities for mediation; recommend strategy for addressing and managing the dispute. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law (LAWS) students only.

    Explores some of the more successful and enduring critiques of Chicago Law and Economics. Starts with an introduction to economic analysis, including basic analytic tools like rational actor theory, supply and demand, efficiency notions, and cost concepts. Later classes will explore more advanced works in the area.

    Focuses on legal, moral, and economic analyses of problems posed or soon to be posed by advances in biomedical technologies.

    Studies ethical and legal regulation of lawyers, auditors, and investment bankers, who have been described as "Gatekeepers" to the investment markets. Considers changes in ethical and legal regulation that can be adopted to restore a sense of integrity for these professionals.

    Explores how dignitary interests have influenced the development of and have been incorporated into law, using the common law of torts and the constitutional rights of life and liberty as a general (but not exclusive) focal point of discussion.

    Considers both legal and literary depictions of women and their legal and extralegal situations. Topics may include women as mothers, women as sexual beings, women's silence, women's violence and women as criminals, women at work, and women as the "Other" in law and literature.

    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.

    Explores the intersection of gender and criminal justice in such areas as police and prosecutorial discretion, the investigation and prevention of crimes, the definition of offenses and defenses, factors contributing to criminality, criminal sentencing and the experience of punishment, and the societal ramifications of incarcerating children's caregivers.

    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 (LAWS) 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 (LAWS) 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 (LAWS) 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. Recommended prereq., LAWS 7525. Prerequisites: Restricted to Law (LAWS) students only.

    Connects studies of race and immigration. This seminar will examine the notion of citizenship in recent scholarship spanning law, political science, sociology, and history. No prerequisites required, although students will find that this seminar complements courses related to immigration and race and the law, among others.

    Pages