Courses

• Concentration
• Course Descriptions
   

The following courses have recently been offered, or will be offered in the current academic year. Numbers in parentheses indicate which academic year(s) the courses were offered: 2007-08 courses are coded (8); 2008-09 courses are coded (9); and 2009-10 courses are coded (10).

Course Descriptions

CORE COURSES

CIVIL RIGHTS LITIGATION This course examines the arc of federal civil rights law, beginning with the Reconstruction statutes, 42 U.S.C. 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981, 1982, 1983, and 1985, with particular emphasis on § 1983. We study the following issues in some detail: constitutional and non-constitutional rights enforceable under § 1983, qualified and absolute immunities, governmental liability for the acts of individual officials, monetary and injunctive relief, and attorney's fees. We then examine the civil rights legislation enacted during the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Titles IV and IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Finally, we briefly consider more recent civil rights statutes including the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Equal Pay Act. The course emphasizes similarities and differences among these approaches to federal civil rights protection.

Constitutional History I: American Revolution to 1896 This course will trace the history of American constitutional law development from 1776 to 1896. Topics to be covered include the framing and ratification of the Constitution, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the landmark decisions of the Marshall Court, the constitutional ramifications of slavery and emancipation, and the impact of economic change on constitutional politics and constitutional law.

Constitutional History II: The Twentieth Century This course examines the constitutional history of twentieth century United States in the context of social, cultural, political, and intellectual developments. It explores the ways in which many actors—laypeople, social movement organizations, lawyers, academics, politicians, and judges—participated in the construction of constitutional law. The principal issues addressed include constitutional questions involving race and citizenship in the early twentieth century; economic regulation during the Lochner era; the birth of modern free speech jurisprudence in the wake of World War I; the constitutional crisis over the New Deal in the 1930s; the birth of the modern Establishment Clause in the late 1940s; free speech issues involving Jehovah’s Witnesses and Communists in the 1940s and 1950s; the numerous rights revolutions of the Warren Court, including civil rights, criminal procedure, and the rights of the poor; the limitation of many of those rights in the 1970s, including debates over affirmative action; and the expansion of the rights of women and of privacy rights in the 1970s.

CRIMINAL ADJUDICATION This course examines the adjudication of criminal cases from "bail to jail." Topics include bail and preventive detention, prosecutorial discretion, case screening by preliminary hearing and grand jury, the right to effective assistance of counsel, discovery, the right to jury trial, double jeopardy, guilty pleas and plea bargaining, sentencing, and habeas corpus. Although some attention is given to statutory federal rules, the course emphasizes the constitutional doctrines that govern the adjudication process.

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONThis course examines the constitutional doctrines that surround and control the investigation of crime; in particular, the doctrines that define what the police can and cannot do. The primary topics are the law of searches and seizures, police interrogation, and the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

Education Law and Policy This course considers law and policy pertaining to elementary, secondary, and higher education. The focus of the course is how educational systems respond to and/or exacerbate inequality. Topics include: school desegregation; school finance; school choice; parochial education; charter schools; schools targeting students based on sex, race, or sexual orientation; standardized testing; the No Child Left Behind Act; affirmative action in higher education; and market-driven models of higher education. In addition to constitutional and statutory law, course materials include readings in educational theory, history, and sociology.

EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION This course focuses upon the principal federal statutes prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of race or sex, especially Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. It also examines the federal constitutional law of racial and sexual discrimination, primarily as it affects judicial interpretation of the preceding statutes.

FAMILY LAW This basic offering focuses on legal problems of marriage and marital breakdown and the legal regulation of the parent-child relationship. Substantial time is devoted to antenuptial agreements, divorce jurisdiction and grounds, economic aspects of marriage dissolution (including equitable division of property by courts as well as private ordering through contracts), the establishment and termination of nonmarital relationships, establishing parenthood, child support, child custody, and adoption. The course includes coverage of transracial adoption, race as a factor in custody law and the constitutional prohibition of legal restrictions on interracial marriage. It also deals with issues that in practice raise issues of racial discrimination such as state intervention to protect children.

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. Historically, much of U.S. immigration law has been shaped by considerations of race, especially during the reign of the national-origins quota laws. This course considers that history and takes account of the role of race in ongoing U.S. law and practice, including the debate over the use of nationality or ethnic profiling in the immigration-law responses to the September 11 attacks.

INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAWThis 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.

JUDICIAL ROLE IN AMERICAN HISTORY A survey of leading American Supreme Court judges from Marshall through the Burger Court. The course will consist of lectures and readings, along with discussions of topics on contemporary issues.

LAND USE LAWThis course explores the legal regulation of how land may be used, with an emphasis on the constitutional and environmental dimensions of land use law. The course begins with the basic elements of the land development and regulation process, including the basics of zoning and planning. We then address the following topics, among others: constitutional constraints on land use regulation, including those imposed by the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment's Taking Clause; housing discrimination on the grounds of race, income, lifestyle, and disability; fair housing laws and other statutory responses to discriminatory land-use policies; "environmental justice" issues, including regional obligations of municipalities for noxious facilities; environmental law as a constraint on land use; and land use law as environmental regulation. Although the course focuses primarily on the public regulation of land, we also address public ownership and private, market-based alternatives to regulation.

Nationalism and Cultural Identity This course makes use of cultural studies, political theory, history, and law to study forms of group identity and membership as well as the politics of inclusion, exclusion, and recognition of groups by states. The course decouples the concepts of nation (a community of ethnic, racial or cultural relatedness) and state (a geo-political body) in order to explore the relationships between the two. The course focuses on attempts at national definition by the United States (through immigration and citizenship law, holidays, monuments, etc.) and on the struggles by nationalist groups for recognition within pluralist states, but it also provides a solid foundation for anyone interested in nationalism in an international context.

RACE AND LAW With such watershed events in the civil rights movement as Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights acts of the 1960s, the eradication of racial subordination in America seemed an achievable goal. Yet, in America today, racial minorities continue to suffer and race relations have even deteriorated in many respects. Whether the law has aided or impeded the cause of civil rights in the past, and the extent to which the law can help to resolve racial issues in the present and future, are questions of considerable controversy. This seminar examines the response of law to racial issues in a variety of contemporary legal contexts. Topics may include education, employment, criminal justice, voting, interracial relationships and adoption, and hate speech. The materials consist of a mix of cases and scholarly commentary. Classes center on candid discussion about the issues raised in the assigned materials.

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.

THE RULE OF LAW: CONTROLLING GOVERNMENTThis seminar explores the theory and cost of government failure and its relationship to contemporary movements for constitutional and legal reform. The seminar reviews information about government failure internationally and domestically; examines theoretical approaches to explaining such failure, including public choice theory; and then examines the implications for the rule of law and constitutional and legal reform as applied to controlling government. The class emphasizes protecting minorities from a majority in a democratic society—and the even greater danger to minorities in non-democratic countries. It also examines the discriminatory impact of social security on minorities.

SOCIAL SCIENCE IN LAWThis course deals with the uses of social science by practitioners and courts. The roots of social science in legal realism are considered, and the basic components of social science methodology are introduced. No background in methodology or statistics is necessary. Both applications in the criminal context (e.g., obscenity, parole, sentencing) and in civil law (e.g., desegregation, trademarks, custody) are considered.

SEMINARS

Advanced Race and Law Projects Over the past decade, legal scholars have highlighted the divide between race and law scholarship and civil rights lawyering. This course addresses the disjunction between legal theory and practice by creating a pedagogical space that allows students to closely examine, and produce creative solutions to, real-world problems involving race and law. Students work with practitioners, academics and/or government officials and develop projects focused on salient issues related to race, law and public policy.

AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY This seminar provides students with an opportunity to investigate problems in American legal history and to learn from one another. Each student will write a 40-page research paper, evaluate 5 or 6 papers written by classmates, and participate in weekly discussions of important works written from different historiographical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives. Each student will also have a weekly appointment time to discuss (and establish) with the instructor a topic, an appropriate method, and a plan of work. Papers may focus on the eighteenth, the nineteenth, or the twentieth centuries.

American Social and Legal History This seminar considers issues in 20th-century social and constitutional history, with special emphasis on race matters. The course considers historiography and focuses on connections between social movements and legal developments. Readings include texts about social and/or legal aspects of the civil rights, labor, and anti-poverty/welfare rights movements.

CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY FROM PLESSY TO BROWN This seminar explores the various meanings of civil rights in the 50 years that preceded Brown v. Board of Education. Examining civil rights cases from Plessy v. Ferguson through World War II and beyond, the emphasis of the course is on recreating the uncertainties that characterized civil rights doctrine in the 1940s—a decade during which the old Lochner framework was discredited but still lingering, racial issues were increasingly salient on the public scene, and no single doctrinal approach to civil rights was ascendant. It will explore how both the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Section and the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund approached the issues of labor and class that had dominated conceptions of civil rights prior to the 1940s, and whether and how they incorporated those conceptions into their own.

COLLOQUIUM IN AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY This reading and discussion seminar covers selected topics in the history and historiography of American law. Topics for consideration include the law of slavery, Reconstruction, family law, immigration, citizenship, liberty of contract, freedom of speech, legal thought, and the civil rights revolution.

EDUCATION LAW AND POLICY This seminar considers law and policy pertaining to public education, mainly state and federal constitutional and statutory law concerning elementary and secondary education. The goal of the seminar is to examine how educational systems function as tools of socialization and social ordering, and how individuals and communities interact (and sometimes collide) with these systems. In addition to case and statutory law, course materials include readings in educational theory, history, and sociology. Moreover, the seminar addresses tensions between the values and goals of lawyers, judges, legislators, and educational theorists, with a particular emphasis on questions of pedagogy, student achievement, and equality. Topics include school segregation, school finance, school choice, same-sex schooling, standardized testing, ability grouping, special education, and affirmative action in higher education.

rACE AND lAW With such watershed events in the civil rights movement as Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, the eradication of racial subordination in America seemed an achievable goal. Yet, in America today, the condition of many African-Americans and of race relations continue to suffer and, indeed, have deteriorated in many respects. Whether the law has aided or impeded the cause of civil rights in the past, and the extent to which the law can help to resolve racial issues in the present and future, are questions of considerable controversy. This course will examine the response of law to racial issues in a variety of contemporary legal contexts, including affirmative action, criminal justice, voting rights, interracial relationships and adoption, and hate speech. The materials will consist of a mix of cases and scholarly commentary. Classes will center on candid discussion about the issues raised in the assigned materials.

Special education Law This seminar will give students an introduction to the field of special education law. We will focus on the federal statute governing special education – the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) – its implementing regulations, and the numerous cases interpreting and enforcing IDEA. Some attention will also be given to the No Child Left Behind Act, the Rehabilitation Act and relevant state laws, as well as to the complex issues presented by the interplay of law and education policy. The course is designed to emphasize the practical aspects of special education and related laws. Through the framework of special education law and policy, students will learn how to analyze a legal problem, ascertain the interests and incentives at play on both sides of the issue, and evaluate various legal and non-legal tools available for solving the problem. In addition to studying the statutes, regulations, and case law, we will use classic fact patterns to explore how the law influences everyday interactions between schools and families. Finally, we will evaluate the law in effectuating its promise: meeting the unique educational needs of students with disabilities within integrated settings and preparing them for further education, employment, and independent living.

URBAN LAW AND POLICY This seminar examines the legal, economic, and political forces that have shaped American metropolitan areas with particular attention to the policies that have shaped American cities and suburbs. The course considers issues such as sprawl, racial segregation, housing, education, land use, concentrated poverty, and community economic development.

Warren Court This seminar will examine most of the leading cases of the Warren Court. Topics to be considered include Brown v. Board of Education and its enforcement, the Communist cases, the reapportionment cases, the school prayer cases, criminal procedure, free speech, congressional enforcement in civil rights cases, poverty, the death penalty, and abortion. Readings for each week’s session will include: briefs, conference notes, excerpted opinions, newspaper reaction, and law review commentary.

CLINICS

International Human Rights Law Clinic This semester-long clinic gives students first-hand experience in human rights advocacy working in partnership with non-governmental organizations (NGOs)* and human rights law firms in the U.S. and abroad. Clinic projects are selected to build the knowledge and skills necessary to be an effective human rights lawyer; to integrate the theory and practice of human rights; and to expose students to a range of human rights practices. Students collaborate on two projects in small teams, and have direct contact with the partner-clients. Class discussions focus on human rights law concepts and advocacy, and the legal, strategic, ethical, and theoretical issues raised by the project work. The Clinic provides substantial opportunity to develop international law research and writing skills.

Immigration Law Clinic This semester-long clinic will be offered in conjunction with the Legal Aid Justice Center. Students will have a variety of responsibilities in the Clinic where they will be learning to make critical legal judgments. Students will be assigned several clients, and each will handle at least one complicated case involving extensive client interviewing, factual investigation, and legal brief(s). Clients come from diverse backgrounds and frequently have unusual factual scenarios that bring them to the doors of Legal Aid. Students will be expected to work with the clients and understand what they want and what we can pursue for them through available legal mechanisms. The Clinic and Legal Aid are more than free counsel for qualifying clients, but a community service providing an orientation to basic rights and available services to walk-ins and the wider community.

SHORT COURSES

Cultural Property This seminar examines the legal regimes that regulate interests in cultural property. Topics include: the repatriation of antiquities, the rights of artists yo control or profit from their works, and the enforcement of limitations on access to documents of significant public interest.

Indian Law The legal relationships between the Indian tribes and the national government, and between the tribes and the states, define a distinctive but growing body of federal law. This course will serve as an introduction to this body of law. It will explore several current issues relating to the authority of Indian tribes and the operation of state and federal law within Indian reservations. In the time available, we can cover only selected highlights; many topics covered in the semester-long course that has some years been part of the curriculum won't be treated.

Race and Politics This course focuses on the Voting Rights Act and the relationship between racially polarized voting and electoral outcomes. We will look at political science articles on the impact that a candidate's race has on voters across different regions. We will also explore the law's response to racial bloc voting through the Voting Rights Act.

Special Education LawThis course is designed to give students an introduction to the field of special education law. It will focus on the main federal statute governing special education – the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) – and the numerous cases interpreting and enforcing it. Some attention will also be given to the No Child Left Behind Act, the Rehabilitation Act and relevant state laws, as well as to the policy issues presented by special education.

Return to Top

Mission | Courses | Faculty | Scholarship | News & Events
Students & Organizations