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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. 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 discussion seminar, 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. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

In law school, you will be reading a lot of judicial opinions. Most of the time, you'll be reading them with an eye to their legal holding. In this seminar, you'll be reading them with a different question in mind: What makes one judicial opinion better than another? What is it about certain opinions that leads them to be considered particularly effective or important? When is a judicial opinion "great"? You will read a variety of opinions from different judges and justices, subject areas, perspectives, and time periods, as well as some academic articles about judicial opinions and legal writing. Spoilers: There is no one answer to the title of this seminar. The goal will be to complicate the question and think about the different tools and objectives judges have when they write. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

In law, the burden of proof specifies which party must provide evidence to support their claim (the burden of production) as well as the amount of evidence required for them to prevail (the burden of persuasion). In this seminar, we will start by examining the logic of the burden of proof as well as the effectiveness of its implementation. We will then apply the same concepts to disputes in the natural and social sciences, and in political argumentation and social discourse. Descriptively, we will examine whether participants in these domains impose similar burdens of proof on one side of a debate, either explicitly or implicitly. Normatively, we will examine whether one side should bear a greater burden of proof, and whether and how such burdens of proof might get implemented outside a courtroom setting. We will consider a variety of case studies and examine moderating factors such as the status quo, legal rights, asymmetries of power, error tradeoffs, the need for closure, and various criteria for distributive and/or procedural fairness. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

This discussion section is intended to give students a basic understanding of the themes in the legal regulation of elections and politics. We will cover several Supreme Court cases on topics of voting rights, reapportionment/ redistricting, ballot access, regulation of political parties, and campaign finance. We will begin each session with an update on litigation related to the 2024 election and attempt to tie the themes of the class to ongoing controversies in the law of contemporary American democracy. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.