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From the rhetorical fireworks of the classic American trial scene to the band Pussy Riot's "aesthetic resistance" in Russia, law and performance have been entangled in more and less officially sanctioned ways. This discussion seminar will address questions at the intersection of law and performance, such as: What are the ethical implications of performance in the legal context?; When does or should freedom of performance come into conflict with the norms of a well-ordered society?; Can examining methods of musical interpretation help us to adjudicate between originalism and living constitutionalism?, and; What can drama reveal to us about the law? Among other readings will be included Jack Balkin's work on opera and constitutional interpretation, Kenji Yoshino's "The City and the Poet," Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, and Desmond Manderson's "Making a Point and Making a Noise: A Punk Prayer."nSpring Quarter.nClass meeting dates: To be determined by instructor.nElements used in grading: Class attendance at all sessions and class participation.nDiscussions in Ethical and Professional Values Courses Ranking Form: To apply for this course, 2L, 3L and Advanced Degree students must complete and submit a Ranking Form available on the SLS Registrar's Office website (see Registration and Selection of Classes for Stanford Law Students and then see Consent of Instructor Forms). See Ranking Form for instructions and submission deadline.

This seminar will cover topics in the general area of law and politics, specifically the law concerning elections. The discussions will focus on the following five case studies: Redistricting; Bush v. Gore and the 2000 election; Campaign Finance; Party Primaries and Conventions; and The Voting Rights Act. Although we will discuss court cases, much of the seminar will include "war stories" from those involved in the cases or legislative battles. Students who plan to enroll in "Regulation of the Political Process" are encouraged to take this discussion seminar as well. But that class is not a prerequisite for this seminar. Note: Los Altos location is not walkable. Winter Quarter. Class meeting dates: TBD. DISCUSSIONS IN ETHICAL & PROFESSIONAL VALUES COURSES RANKING FORM: To apply for this course, 2L, 3L and Advanced Degree students must complete and submit a Ranking Form available on the SLS Registrar's Office website (see Registration and Selection of Classes for Stanford Law Students and then see Consent of Instructor Forms). See Ranking Form for instructions and submission deadline.

This discussion group will explore satisfaction in professional practice. Readings will explore the conditions of current practice, with an emphasis on law firms, and what can be learned from research on happiness. Books to be excerpted may include Nancy Levit and Douglas Linder, The Happy Lawyer, Steven Harper, The Lawyer Bubble, Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness, Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness, Bryant Garth, After the JD, Milton Reagan, Eat What You Kill, and Nash and Stevenson, Just Enough.nBegin in Winter Quarter and run through Spring Quarter.nClass meeting dates: To be determined by instructor.nElements used in grading: Class attendance at all sessions and class participation.nDiscussions in Ethical and Professional Values Courses Ranking Form: To apply for this course, 2L, 3L and Advanced Degree students must complete and submit a Ranking Form available on the SLS Registrar's Office website (see Registration and Selection of Classes for Stanford Law Students and then see Consent of Instructor Forms). See Ranking Form for instructions and submission deadline.

Lawyers are charged with prosecuting and defending the civil and criminal failings of others. In client counseling and transactional representation, we are charged with helping our clients avoid failure. And as professionals, we are enjoined to avoid failures ourselves. So we spend our careers in and around failure - anticipating it, reconstructing it, and seeking to prevent and remedy it. This seminar explores the human experience of failure in both legal and non-legal settings. What are the circumstances (structural and cognitive) that appear to lead to personal, professional, legal, political, and moral failures? How does the law shape social understandings of what failure is? What kinds of failures appear to support the belief that failure is (almost always) avoidable, and thus the fault of individuals who experience failure? Why do other failures seem inevitable? What is the narrative structure and allure of representations of failure as a condition of success? How are failure and the harms that flow from the experience of failure remembered or forgotten by individuals and groups who cause failure and those who attempt to redress it? Sources for the seminar will range from cases dealing with professional malpractice and cultural histories of professional ideology to poetry, constitutional history, theories of creative destruction, and responses to mass atrocities. Begins in Winter Quarter and runs through Spring Quarter. Class meeting dates: Five evening sessions to be determined by instructor in coordination with enrolled students. Elements used in grading: Class attendance at all sessions and class participation. To apply for this course, 2L, 3L and Advanced Degree students must complete an application form available on the SLS Registrar's Office website (see Registration and Selection of Classes for Stanford Law Students and then see Consent of Instructor Forms). See form for instructions and submission deadline.

Patterned on a seminar taught by Professor Joseph Weiler at NYU Law School, this discussion seminar will study the most famous criminal case in the history of the world: the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus of Nazareth. In five two-hour sessions at Professor McConnell's home, we will cover (1) Jesus's arrest in the the Garden of Gethsemane, (2) his trial before Jewish authorities, (3) his trial before Roman authorities, and (4) his execution, with (5) one session left for general considerations. (We will not delve into the reports of his resurrection.) We will focus on the nature of the charges against Jesus, the legal procedures employed, the evidence and the defense, the relation between imperial and local authorities, the relation between religious and secular law, the ethical roles of the individuals involved, and the mode of execution. Our primary text will be Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah (Yale University Press 2004), a scholarly two-volume study drawing on all the extant historical sources. Among the questions we are likely to discuss are: Was the trial fair by the standards of the day? Was Jesus guilty of any of the charges? What were the authorities - and particularly Pilate - trying to accomplish? What was the role of the mob? Was Roman law a constraining influence, or the opposite? What was Jesus's own perspective on the proceedings? How reliable and/or plausible are the sources? Although this subject is of religious and spiritual concern to some, including (in all likelihood) some students taking the seminar, the seminar will not consider the material in a religious way, but instead as a legal event. The instructor hopes that the class will be religiously diverse, and especially encourages non-Christian students to enroll. Discussion will, of course, be conducted in a way that is comfortable for persons of all shades of belief and disbelief. Begin in Winter Quarter and run through Spring Quarter. Class meeting dates: To be determined by instructor. Elements use in grading: Class attendance at all sessions and class participation. Discussions in Ethical and Professional Values Courses Ranking Form: To apply for this course, 2L, 3L and Advanced Degree students must complete and submit a Ranking Form available on the SLS Registrar's Office website (see Registration and Selection of Classes for Stanford Law Students and then see Consent of Instructor Forms). See Ranking Form for instructions and submission deadline.

We will discuss Plato's Republic with a focus on its treatment of law, justice, equality, and legal institutions. After the first session, on Book One, students will take turns co-leading the discussions. Limited to eight students, the seminar will meet in the instructor's home. Begin in Winter Quarter and run through Spring Quarter. The class will meet in the evening, on a weekday. Exact meeting time and dates to be determined by consensus of the participants. DISCUSSIONS IN ETHICAL & PROFESSIONAL VALUES COURSES RANKING FORM: To apply for this course, 2L, 3L and Advanced Degree students must complete and submit a Ranking Form available on the SLS Registrar's Office website (see Registration and Selection of Classes for Stanford Law Students and then see Consent of Instructor Forms). See Ranking Form for instructions and submission deadline.

There have been a number of efforts to define what "law and the humanities" comprehends, some including history and philosophy as disciplines juxtaposed with law and others insisting on a narrower version of the field. A newer movement led by Chris Tomlins has rejected the "law and" model entirely and insists instead on formulating interdisciplinary work in law as "law as." This discussion seminar will examine inductively what law and the humanities might mean and the significance of its contribution by considering a number of essays and articles that could be thought of as work in law and the humanities. Each session will be devoted to a pair of writings around topics like "Law and Literature," "Legal History," and "Law and Performance." Questions to be considered include the role of law within these projects, the audience being addressed, the larger social significance of the arguments being made, and the extent to which the pieces are grounded in a particular discipline or set of disciplines or float above disciplinary formations. Begin in Winter Quarter and run through Spring Quarter. Class meeting dates: To be determined by instructor. Elements use in grading: Class attendance at all sessions and class participation. Discussions in Ethical and Professional Values Courses Ranking Form: To apply for this course, 2L, 3L and Advanced Degree students must complete and submit a Ranking Form available on the SLS Registrar's Office website (see Registration and Selection of Classes for Stanford Law Students and then see Consent of Instructor Forms). See Ranking Form for instructions and submission deadline.

Very generally speaking, we try, as individuals, to avoid injuring people and, collectively, to adopt policies that minimize injury, in the sense that we don't want to make people worse off, in some hedonic sense, or deprive them of options or capacities that we think they ought to have. Moreover, our legal system frequently compensates people who are injured (and therefore must ascertain if, and how badly, they are injured.)What we get the chance to investigate and discuss in this discussion group is what we mean when we say that people are injured by some particular practices or outcomes that might seem, without much reflection, to be obviously injurious. More particularly, we will discuss five issues: (1) In our first session, we will work out the implications of an academic literature that seems to explore what I see to be one of the finest of one-line jokes ("Nothing matters, and what if it did?"). The literature on hedonic adaptation might seem to suggest that we can neither injure others nor improve their lots: very quickly, people return to a (generally mildly positive) fixed equilibrium state even when seemingly very good or very bad things happen to them. We will explore the literature and its limits. (2) In the final four sessions, we will explore four conditions or practices that seem intuitively injurious and problematic and try to figure out more precisely what might be bad about them, or whether they are actually injurious in the ways that we might at first think: we will explore what is injurious about poverty, discrimination, sexual harassment, and even the big one, death. Begin in Winter Quarter and run through Spring Quarter. Class meeting dates: Meetings will be in the evenings. Exact meeting time and dates to be determined by consensus of the participants. DISCUSSIONS IN ETHICAL & PROFESSIONAL VALUES COURSES RANKING FORM: To apply for this course, 2L, 3L and Advanced Degree students must complete and submit a Ranking Form available on the SLS Registrar's Office website (see Registration). See Ranking Form for instructions and submission deadline. Elements used in grading: Class attendance at all sessions and class participation.

There has been growing interest in investments in for-profit enterprises where investors seek particular social outcomes (e.g., health, sanitation, or financial services for the poor) in addition to or even at the sacrifice of financial return. A small but growing subset of impact investments involves social impact bonds to help finance government pay-for-success contracts with organizations seeking to problems such as recidivism, homelessness, and asthma. Foundations, including Gates, Ford, and MacArthur make such impact investments through what the Internal Revenue Code terms "program-related investments," which count toward the foundations' required annual payout. And some family offices and high net worth individuals make them out of their checkbooks. We will take a sympathetic but skeptical look at a range of impact investments to understand their potential for solving social problems and also their limitations. Two pervasive questions will be the scope of investment opportunities that sacrifice financial return, and whether and when investments that seek risk-adjusted financial returns accomplish anything that ordinary commercial investments wouldn't do anyway. The discussion seminar requires no prior knowledge of philanthropy or finance. Winter Quarter. Class meeting dates: To be determined by instructor. DISCUSSIONS IN ETHICAL & PROFESSIONAL VALUES COURSES RANKING FORM: To apply for this course, 2L, 3L and Advanced Degree students must complete and submit a Ranking Form available on the SLS Registrar's Office website (see Registration). See Ranking Form for instructions and submission deadline. Elements used in grading: Class attendance at all sessions and class participation.