11 - 20 of 131 results for: LAW

Our rapidly changing climate demands that we act quickly and robustly to decarbonize the economy. But how do we create a just transition that does not merely replicate, or worse yet exacerbate, the inequities of the past? In this discussion seminar, we will explore the tensions, challenges, and opportunities that society faces as it navigates the path forward to an ecologically sustainable future. We will discuss some of the most pressing climate justice controversies at the local, state, national, and international level. Class meets 6:00 PM-8:00 PM on Sept. 21, Oct. 5, Oct. 17, Nov. 2. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

This seminar will explore how to accommodate efforts to promote inclusion and belonging for students with diverse identities and viewpoints and academic freedom and freedom of expression. We will test the hypothesis that it is possible to serve these important interests without compromising any of them. Our substantive goal is to contribute to the solution of actual contemporary problems in American universities. Our procedural goal is for the seminar to model productive critical discourse about difficult issues. Needless to say, the seminar will address controversial topics involving participants' identities and ideological beliefs, and calls for active listening, empathy, humility, and charity on everyone's part. We will begin by examining the purpose of the university, the differences between faculty members' academic freedom and students' rights to free expression, and the limits of both. With respect to academic freedom, we'll consider proceedings by the University of Pennsylvania Law School to discipline a faculty member for "intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements." One of the major reasons for protecting students' free expression is to create an environment in which they can engage in the core educational practices of critical inquiry and discourse. Critical discourse requires that students feel free to express ideas without fear of being ostracized. We will ask how to create such an environment without infringing on faculty's academic freedom (e.g., by mandating trigger warnings) or students free expression (e.g., by mandating the Chatham House rule, which prohibits attributing statements made in class to particular students). We will then address a selection of other issues, all with a problem-solving attitude: How can universities support the inclusion and participation of socially marginalized students and students with views across ideological and political spectrums in ways that avoid institutional orthodoxy and encourage open discourse?; How can universities prevent and remedy harmful attacks on community members' identities and beliefs in ways that are consistent with academic freedom, free expression, privacy, and due process?; How, consistent with principles of academic freedom, can a university ascertain whether a candidate for promotion or for a faculty position will engage in behaviors that promote inclusion? The seminar will be held over four dinners at the home of Paul and Iris Brest on the Stanford campus. Meets 6:00 PM-8:00 PM on Oct. 4, Oct. 18, Nov. 1, and Nov. 15. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

George Orwell's great work contains reflections on thought control in authoritarian societies, including use of pervasive surveillance, policing of language, organized hate, and the big lie. The group will gather in my home for dinner followed by discussion of current relevance of the book, supplemented by several other essays by and about Orwell. Class meets 6:30 PM-9:00 PM on Sept. 14, Oct. 10, Nov. 2, Nov. 16. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

This seminar will cover selected topics in election law and the law of democracy. It will cover landmark cases concerning the right to vote, ballot access, redistricting, and campaign finance. Students will be assigned one or two long cases per week. Each week will include a one hour lecture or war story followed by a one hour dinner discussion. Class meets 4:00 PM-6:00 PM on Oct. 3, Oct. 17, Oct. 31, Nov. 7. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

This seminar explores debates over the nature and purposes of law and legal education in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present--with a particular focus on the role of law schools in managing the line between law and politics. We will begin by examining the formation of modern legal education at Harvard, exploring the turn to legal formalism and its interconnections with the rise of modern capitalism (including the emergence of the defense bar) and anti-immigrant sentiment (including the rise of the plaintiffs' bar). The formalist approach--and its deployment by a conservative U.S. Supreme Court eager to strike down welfare legislation in the Progressive era--would in turn give rise to sociolegal jurisprudence and later legal realism. Centered first and foremost at Columbia and Yale, these approaches would profoundly transform American law schools, all but definitively separating American legal education from its counterparts across the globe. In the wake of the Second World War, as Americans increasingly turned to positivist social science and its promise of law beyond politics, American legal education embraced a new philosophy--that of the process school--which highlighted (American) institutions and procedure as the key to avoiding the pitfalls of both formalism and realism. We will conclude by examining the current landscape of American legal education. Even as the promise of the process school has faltered, the present-day American law school is indelibly marked by its history--including the case method (inherited from late nineteenth-century formalism), a realist commitment to studying law in action, and the process school¿s obsession with (American) institutions and procedure (as exemplified by the study of federal courts). At the same time, we see a turn to interdisciplinarity and to legal clinics--representing the polar extremes of law as science and law as professional practice. But as the perennial question of the relationship between law and politics has become increasingly urgent in the present moment, what has become of the role of legal education in managing the line between law and politics--long the focal point of debates over law and its teaching? Class meets 5:30 PM-7:30 PM on Sept. 21, Oct. 4, Oct. 19, Nov. 16. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

People generally come to law school because they believe that law and legal institutions matter. Many think that the study of law will enable them to more effectively influence important social institutions. Some also come to law school hoping to use their law degrees to make the world better -- whatever that means to them. Contemporary left social movements offer a range of visions for what might make the world better, including (but certainly not limited to): abolishing police and prisons; developing a decarbonized economy; restructuring the economic order more generally; implementing systems for reparations and repair for racialized enslavement and dispossession; and opening borders. These visions exist alongside other, sometimes competing, ideas for how to make the world better. This seminar will interrogate the connection between law and hopeful visions for the future. We will engage in some critique of existing institutions, and of the limits of law, but the focus of the conversation will be creative envisioning, not critique. We'll explore the questions of whether and how it is possible to design legal frameworks that move toward more hopeful futures. Class meets 4:30 PM-6:30 PM on Oct. 4, Oct. 18, Nov. 1, Nov. 15. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

Since America's founding, local political engagement (through participation, leadership, and organizing in local politics) has been a linchpin of our democratic order and adult education. That engagement is deeply challenged today by economic segregation, technological and media changes, the downsizing of local journalism, and the loss of institutions that forge local social networks (such as small businesses, churches, and neighborhood-based nonprofits). Yet meanwhile, poor and working class communities need local solutions and activism to face severe challenges such as environmental disasters, low wages, drug addiction, family dissolution, and disinvestment in basic services, schools, and infrastructure. This reading group will sit with stories and strategies of local democratic reengagement. Through a range of readings (from memoir to academic commentary) as well as films and podcasts, we'll discuss a deliberately diverse set of voices, from environmental justice activists to conservative thought leaders. We'll situate our discussions in a diverse set of urban and rural places, including California's agricultural interior, rural Alabama, Oregon's timber counties, post-industrial Massachusetts, and urban Mississippi. My hope is that our group of students--like the authors and protagonists of our discussions--will be racially, politically, economically, and geographically heterogeneous, allowing us to envision and teach each other to become better actors in the project of local political engagement for the public good. Class meets 5:00 PM-7:00 PM on Sept. 28, Oct. 12, Oct. 26, Nov. 16. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

In this discussion seminar we will examine the growth of 'artificial intelligence' (natural language processing, machine learning, and predictive analytics) from an interdisciplinary perspective. The principal objects of focus will be theories of innovation, the proliferation of algorithmic systems that subject human behavior and judgment to algorithmic control, the dependence of algorithmic systems on data surveillance, problems of error, 'leakage,' and bias (including racial bias), the promise of automation, the displacement of ordinary law and professional expertise by algorithmic code, and the tensions between liberal democratic concepts of the rule of law and the operation of code as law. No computer science training or previous training in critical theory is necessary. Class meets 6:00 PM-8:00 PM on Tuesdays (Specific dates are TBA, but we will most likely hold one session in September, two in October, and one in early November). Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

The eminent economist Albert O. Hirschman is especially famous for his book Exit, Voice, Loyalty (1970). The subtitle of the book--Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States--may give you a little sense of the argument: that people who are dissatisfied with an institution to which they are attached have three choices. They can leave (switch to another product; quit; emigrate); they can try to change the institution through protest; or they can remain a customer, member, or citizen who goes along with (and perhaps even continues to support) the institution's choices. In this reading group, we will talk about how, as lawyers, we should think about these options. We'll start with a brief overview of Hirschman's argument and an essay by Hannah Arendt about lawyers and bureaucrats in Nazi Germany. We'll then look at some contemporary case studies involving U.S. lawyers who wrestled with whether to serve, or remain in, administrations with which they had serious disagreements and about law firms and their clients. Finally, we'll turn to two examples from outside the law--Ursula LeGuin's famous short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and a speech by C.S. Lewis about The Inner Circle--and what they tell us about how to think about our career choices. Class meets 5:30 PM-7:30 PM on Sept. 13, Sept. 27, Oct. 17, Nov. 14. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.