Current and Past Courses & Clinics
The following courses have recently been offered, or will be offered in the current academic year.COURSES AND SEMINARS
Anti-Terrorism, Law and the Role of Intelligence
Civil Liberties
Germs, Guns and Lead: Public Health Law and Policy
Immigration Law
Human Rights Advocacy
Immigration Law
International Criminal Law
International and Foreign Legal Research
International Human Rights Law
International Law
Law and Public Service
Law of War
National Security Law
Refugee Law and Policy
Religion, Democracy and the Law
Rescue, Charity and Justice
Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Rule of Law: Controlling Government
Transitional Justice as a Security Strategy
War and Peace: New Thinking About the Causes of War and War Avoidance
CLINICS
International Human Rights Law
Immigration Law
SHORT COURSES
Citizenship and Membership
Comparative Democratic Constitutionalism
Death Penalty: An International Perspective
Ethical Issues in Foreign Policy
Indian Law
Islamic and Middle Eastern Law
Punishment in Law and Culture
Rights, Bills of Rights, Constitutions: The Americanization of Britain?
CITIZENSHIP AND MEMBERSHIP This short course provides an overview of U.S. citizenship law, including acquisition at birth, naturalization and denaturalization, loss of citizenship, dual nationality, and the history of U.S. doctrine, including the increasing importance of constitutional protections. The course looks briefly at selected international and comparative law issues, including citizenship questions that arise from the breakup of states, and considers deeper questions involving the concept of citizenship and the meaning of membership in a nation.
Civil Liberties The seminar is a survey and discussion of selected contemporary problems in civil liberties, using both case law (largely Supreme Court) and contemporary writings as base materials. The topics for this fall’s classes will be the interplay between rights of privacy and freedom of speech, religious liberty, academic freedom, sexual orientation and civil liberties, terrorism and civil liberties, and alcohol and drug abuse. There is some overlap with Constitutional Law II, as to both subject matter and particular cases addressed. Students are graded on the basis of class participation. Neither an examination nor a paper is required.
DEATH PENALTY: AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE Course lectures cover the issue of capital punishment in an international context. They survey: the history of capital punishment and the movement to restrict its use and then to abolish it; the politics of the abolitionist movement, including the arguments and forces that have been at work to achieve successful abolition and those that have been used to resist it, including public opinion; the influence of international law and the human rights movement; the current scope and use of the death penalty around the world, the modes of enforcing it and the legal and moral issues involved in its application, including arbitrariness, discrimination, the “death row phenomenon,” and error; the evidence regarding the deterrent effect of capital punishment; and alternatives to the death penalty, in particular the legal and penal application of life imprisonment.
ETHICAL ISSUES IN FOREIGN POLICY This short course provides an overview of ethical thinking and examines the ethical implications of four specific foreign affairs decisions, including President Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, decisions to “stress” detainees for intelligence in the war on terror, the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, and the response of the international community to the crisis in Rwanda in 1994.
HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCACY This seminar explores a range of approaches to human rights advocacy, domestic and international, from the perspective of human rights methodology. Students examine diverse tactics, strategies, and venues selected by human rights lawyers and other advocates pursuing similar objectives. We consider the obligations and options of various stakeholders, including states, corporations, NGOs, and individuals. The seminar focuses on strategic choices, including litigation; legislation and policy advocacy; advocacy before the U.N., transnational, regional and national human rights bodies; investigation and documentation; and global human rights campaigns.
IMMIGRATION LAW This course is an introduction to the complex provisions of U.S. immigration laws and the procedures used to decide specific immigration-related issues. Considerable attention is given to underlying constitutional and philosophical issues, to selected questions of international law and politics, and to the interaction of Congress, the courts, and administrative agencies in dealing with major public policy issues in the immigration field.
Indian LAW The legal relationships between American Indian tribes and the national government and between the tribes and state governments define a distinctive but growing body of federal law. This body of law is anchored in decisions rendered by the Supreme Court in the early days of the Republic—three of them authored by the same chief justice, John Marshall. Today, as tribes seek to exploit both their natural resources and their seeming independence from state and much federal regulation, they are brought into conflict with other governments and other citizens. The availability of legal remedies, both for tribal members and others, is a second theme of the course.
INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW This course introduces the theory and practice of international human rights law, with particular emphasis on the ways in which human rights law is made and used. Topics to be covered include: an introduction to key principles of international law; the philosophical foundations of universal human rights; core international human rights norms and their foundations in the U.N. Charter and other treaties, how states incorporate human rights principles domestically; recent human rights-based challenges to the idea of state sovereignty; the increasing overlap between human rights law and international humanitarian law; human rights and development, and international systems and procedures for the protection of human rights.
LAW OF WAR This seminar
introduces students to the contemporary law of war. Participants
will discuss several current issues such as the Bush Administration’s
pre-emption doctrine and applicability of the laws of war to
the war on terrorism. This course is particularly useful for
law students interested in taking the Judge Advocate General’s
School Advanced Topics in the Law of War course.
PUNISHMENT IN LAW AND CULTURE This
short course considers connections between punishment and culture
in the contemporary United States. The class examines punishment
through philosophical literature, literary texts, legal cases,
and film. Among the questions discussed are: Do we punish too
much and too severely, or too little and too leniently? Does
punishment express our noblest aspirations for justice or our
basest desires for vengeance? Can it ever be an adequate expression
of, or response to, the pain of the victims of crime? When is
it appropriate to forgive rather than punish? Students consider
these questions in the context of arguments about the right way
to deal with drug offenders, sexual predators, and terrorists.
In addition, students examine the treatment of punishment in
constitutional law, e.g. the prohibition of double jeopardy and
of cruel and unusual punishment.
REFUGEE LAW and policy This course covers in detail refugee law and the procedures involved in adjudicating claims to political asylum, as well as such topics as: the theory and philosophy of refugee protection, comparative refugee law and procedure ,the special dimensions of gender-based persecution claims, U.S. overseas refugee programs, restructuring the asylum adjudication process, "temporary protected status," the role of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, regional and universal treaties concerning refugees, and extradition law (including the political offense exception). Racism and related prejudices have been the source of many refugee movements. Further, the U.N. Refugee Convention and U.S. legal provisions count persecution on account of race (as well as on account of "membership in a particular social group") as a valid basis for political asylum.
Rights of indigenous peoples From the United Nations and regional human rights institutions to the World Bank and other international institutions, indigenous peoples have made significant gains in recent decades. This seminar will explore emerging norms and principles of indigenous rights within the international legal framework. We will discuss such issues as the definition and concept of indigenous peoples and rights; tensions between individual rights and group rights; historical discriminatory practices (e.g., removal of children from indigenous communities); indigenous peoples’ land rights, environmental law and the activities of multinational corporations; cultural survival and indigenous peoples’ rights under international trade and intellectual property regimes; and indigenous mobilization and international advocacy.
Rights, Bills of Rights, and Constitutions: Britain Begins to Emulate the United States Until 2000, the United Kingdom did not possess a Bill of Rights enforceable in the courts. The passage of the Human Rights Act of 1998 was contentious, even though Britain had largely created the European Convention on Human Rights that the act incorporated into British law. It was (and to some degree still is) widely believed that Britain had no need to incorporate the convention into domestic law, and that it was impossible to entrench rights in British law due to the absence of a written constitution. This short course explains why the British obsession with the “sovereignty of parliament” made incorporation difficult; why politicians, judges and academic observers were hostile to expanding judicial review of government and parliament; why they changed their minds; what the impact of the Human Rights Act has been over the past seven years; and what may happen next. The course will involve some jurisprudence as well as the analysis of interesting recent cases on freedom of religion, sexual self-expression, the rights of suspected terrorists, and the right to a fair trial. The British government has recently proposed a number of further constitutional changes; together they raise the question whether Britain will come to resemble the United States – and in what respects.
Transitional Justice as a Security Strategy This seminar explores the various problems that traditional legal constructs encounter in cyberspace. Included are such subjects as intellectual property rights, the sale and licensing of software, personal jurisdiction, Internet governance, and privacy. Students will prepare and present a substantial research paper on a related topic of their choice.
INTERNATIONAL HUMAN
RIGHTS LAW CLINIC Students
gain first-hand experience in human rights advocacy under
the supervision of international human rights lawyers. Projects
are designed to give students the practical experience necessary
to be effective human rights lawyers and to integrate the
theory and practice of human rights. Class sessions provide
the opportunity to discuss human rights law concepts and
lawyering practice, and the legal, strategic, ethical, and
theoretical issues raised by the project work. The clinic
also provides instruction in international human rights law
research and writing skills. The clinic may have one or more
adjunct instructors. There is no live-client representation
in this clinic.
Clinic Projects
IMMIGRATION LAW CLINIC This semester-long clinic is offered in conjunction with the Legal Aid Justice Center. Students are assigned several clients and handle at least one complex case involving extensive client interviewing, factual investigation, and legal briefs. Female victims of violence are a priority at Legal Aid. Students may also work with clients appealing denials of applications for status, appealing for special categorization or procedures, or clients who have cases complicated by past criminal or immigration histories. Students are expected to keep office hours at LAJC for half a day per week. Spanish-language ability is a plus. The clinic meets for a weekly seminar for much of the semester. The clinic also covers basic ethics and professional responsibility issues, and skills such as eliciting information from abuse victims and working through cultural and language differences.
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