Government and Public
LAWS 5425-4. Torts. Studies nonconsensual allocation of losses for civil wrongs, focusing primarily on concepts of negligence and strict liability.
LAWS 6005-4. Constitutional Law. Studies constitutional structure: judicial review, federalism, separation of powers; and constitutional rights of due process and equal protection.
LAWS 6128 (1-3). Legislation. Examines theories of legislation and the relation between legislatures and courts, emphasizing problems of statutory interpretation and other issues in the judicial use or misuse of statutes.
LAWS 6205-3. Lawyers for Social Change. Helps students expand their perspective to understand the ways in which lawyers more broadly participate in social change work in this service learning class. Analyzes case histories of cause lawyering. The service learning component is based on the precept that one of the most effective ways to learn a role is to perform that role. Students will participate as social change lawyers by working with a local community to help it develop projects that the community believes will help it better itself.
LAWS 7015-3. First Amendment. Examines speech and religion clauses of the First Amendment. Includes the philosophical foundation of free expression, analytical problems in First Amendment jurisprudence, and the relationships between free exercise of religion and the separation of church and state.
LAWS 7025-3. Civil Rights Legislation. Presents a comprehensive study of federal civil rights statutes briefly reviewed in other courses (e.g., Constitutional Law or Federal Courts). Studies federal civil rights statutes, their judicial application, and their interrelationships as a discretely significant body of law of increasing theoretical interest and practical importance.
LAWS 7055-3. Education Law. Considers issues raised by the interaction of law and education. Issues may include the legitimacy of compulsory schooling, alternatives to public schools, socialization and discipline in the schools, and questions of equal educational opportunities.
LAWS 7205-3. Administrative Law. Covers practices and procedures of administrative agencies and limitations thereon, including the Federal Administrative Procedure Act, and the relationship between courts and agencies.
LAWS 7255-3. Local Government. Studies state legislative and judicial control of the activities, powers, and duties of local governmental units, including home-rule cities and counties, and some problems of federal, state, and local constitutional and statutory limitations on governmental powers when exercised by local governmental units (e.g., the powers to regulate private activities, tax, spend, borrow money, and condemn private property for public uses). Offered in alternate years.
LAWS 7325-3. Election Law. Examines the rapidly evolving field of election law: the right to vote, voting procedures, redistricting, candidate selection, campaign finance laws, and direct democracy. Emphasizes federal law, including applicable constitutional jurisprudence.
LAWS 7475-2. Advanced Torts. Studies selected tort actions and theories. Topics covered may include “dignitary torts” (e.g., defamation, privacy, etc.), business torts, and product liability. Offered in alternate years.
LAWS 7515-3. Poverty Law. Explores the legal and policy responses to poverty in the United States and addresses how the law shapes the lives of poor people and communities. Examines the extent of poverty in the United States, the root causes, and the historical development of social welfare policy. Focuses on the rights-based aspect of poverty law and various policies that attempt to ameliorate poverty.
LAWS 7525-3. Race and American Law. Examines the judiciary’s approach to racial discrimination from America’s colonial period to the present day. Concludes with an analysis of the contemporary status of racial subordination in the legal system and considers recent scholarly critiques of the law’s limitations in effecting racial justice. Employs an interdisciplinary approach and covers the experiences of American Indians, African Americans, Asian Pacific Americans, and Chicana/os.
LAWS 8005-2. Seminar: Advanced Constitutional Law Equality and Privacy. Addresses “Equal Protection” rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and “privacy” rights to personal autonomy. Analyzes varied constitutional grounds for recognizing or rejecting abortion rights; limits on Congressional power to pass civil rights laws granting broader rights than the Fourteenth Amendment does; treatment of sexual orientation-related laws and government actions as “privacy” versus “equality” matters; and “benign”/”remedial” race- and sex-based government decisions such as affirmative action and same-sex schools.
LAWS 8015-3. Seminar: Constitutional Theory. Examines the role of the courts and the other branches of government in defining and enforcing constitutional values. Relevant readings are from philosophy, social sciences, and legal scholarship, as well as cases.
LAWS 8025-2. Seminar: Advanced Topics in Federalism. Explores the development of “Our Federalism”, the relationship between federal and state governments, from the founding period of the US Supreme Court’s recent New Federalism jurisprudence. Studies historical material, commentary, and case law, and addresses how federalism is defined; the values that federalism serves; the role of federalism in our interconnected, global society; the Supreme Court’s boundaries of federalism; the direction of New Federalism.
LAWS 8035-2. Seminar: Antidiscrimination and the First Amendment. Addresses past and continuing debates involving potential tensions between antidiscrimination principles and free speech, free exercise, and establishment clause values. Examines constitutional protections under the First Amendment and the equal protection clause, together with an array of existing and proposed federal and state antidiscrimination laws regulating employment, housing, and public accommodations, among other areas.
LAWS 8045-2. Seminar: Comparative Constitutional Law. Examines legal structures and concepts typically found in constitutions, including judicial review, distinction between legislative and executive authority, federalism and the principle of subsidiarity, the relationship between church and state, free speech and press, and social welfare rights. Examines differences between constitutional law and other domestic law, role of comparative constitutional law in domestic constitutional law adjudication. Emphasizes American and Swedish perspectives.
LAWS 8055 (1-2). Seminar: Media, Popular Culture, and the Law. Examines how the institutions, practices, and the very identity of law are in part affected by the media through which law is apprehended and communicated. Hence the general question posed in this seminar: To what extent and how are the forms and methods of the new media having an effect on the perception, role, and identity of law? This is a year-long seminar.
LAWS 8095-2. Seminar: Advanced in Constitutional Law, Theory and Practice of Free Speech in the U.S. Explores how theories of social freedom and self-governance developed in the United States. Analyzes the most controversial socio-legal issues as they relate to privacy, equal protection and other questions of substantive due process. Discusses recent trends in national security and information privacy to evaluate their overall relevance to civil liberties and nascent influence on the fundamental rights debate in the U.S. and abroad.
LAWS 8395-2. Seminar: Separation of Powers. Explores the constitutional relationships among the three branches of the federal government in the sphere of domestic matters, omitting foreign affairs and war. Develops topics including executive orders, Congressional control of the executive and the courts, appointment and removal of officers, impeachment, executive privilege, use of military tribunals, and the election of 2000. A seminar paper will be required.
LAWS 8405-2. Seminar: Public Health Law and Ethics. Explores rules of law pertaining to the American public health care system and the ethical issues raised by the government’s effort to protect the health of the American people. To be held at Health Sciences Campus.
LAWS 8508-2. Seminar: Constitutional Foundations Core Ideas. 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.
LAWS 8515-2. Seminar: Forced Labor. Reviews several regimes of compulsory labor that have been 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.
LAWS 8535-2. Seminar: Class and Law. 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.
LAWS 8705-2. Seminar: Affordable Housing. 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.
LAWS 8755-2. Seminar: Higher Education and the Law. 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.
