21 - 30 of 873 results for: LAW

Throughout history, innovation has been a leading driver of economic growth and has helped lift communities out of poverty, and the importance of knowledge goods to the global economy has only increased with the rise of computing and information technologies. Legal institutions incentivize innovation and allocate access to knowledge goods through a variety of mechanisms, including intellectual property, direct funding through grants and national laboratories, tax incentives, and innovation inducement prizes. In this discussion group, we will examine how these bodies of law are used both to reinforce and subvert existing power structures and inequalities, including issues related to gender, race, geography, and income. We will discuss inequalities among innovators as well as inequalities in access to new innovations, or in who those innovations are made for. We will also consider how these issues might be addressed through legal reforms either internal or external to innovation laws. This discussion seminar will meet four times during the Fall quarter. You will be notified of the meeting times by the instructor. Specific dates, time, and location will also be listed in "Notes" below. Elements used in grading: Attendance and class participation.

In this discussion seminar, we will explore the intersection of access to information and access to justice. Our current social and technological moment promises increased access to basic legal information without economic or geographic boundaries. But access and accessibility remain influenced by identity, privilege, and power. What are our collective expectations for governments to provide legal information in the digital age? How does access to free, easy-to-use, reliable legal information -- or the lack thereof -- have an impact on low-income and other marginalized communities, particularly in how they exercise their rights and protect themselves from harm? By examining how some of the most vulnerable populations access legal information, we can better assess the concept of open government with an eye toward informing and improving access to justice efforts. Topics to be explored through readings and discussion include: 1) the adequacy of pro se litigants' access to legal information within the American prison system; 2) measuring the impact of U.S. states and municipalities that contract with private companies to publish public laws; 3) ways in which technology might help close the justice gap in low-income communities v. how technology can expose vulnerable communities to new forms of victimization; 4) creative and unique systems of information-sharing within the homeless population and how legal organizations might penetrate those systems to combat disenfranchisement of the homeless and provide them with broader access to legal services; and 5) the fragility of freedom of information laws in democracies and whether these laws contribute to a more informed public. This discussion seminar will meet four times during the Fall quarter. You will be notified of the meeting times by the instructor. Specific dates, time, and location will also be listed in "Notes" below. Elements used in grading: Attendance and class participation.

What opportunities do prosecutors and defense attorneys have to help reform the criminal justice system and the wider society? And how can they best take advantage of those opportunities? We will explore these questions by reading and discussing three books: J Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (1998); Gilbert King, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (2013); and Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration (2019). This discussion seminar will meet four times during the Fall quarter. You will be notified of the meeting times by the instructor. Specific dates, time, and location will also be listed in "Notes" below. Elements used in grading: Attendance and class participation.

This discussion seminar will focus on the interplay between religious identity, community, and worldview, and the study and practice of law. As a defining force for so many across the globe, and in the norms through which people anchor rights and relationships, religion has a unique and abiding impact on the legal profession -- for believer and nonbeliever alike. Whether as law students or seasoned practitioners, the need to anticipate, appreciate, and reconcile religious perspectives is both a vital skill and a resource for understanding and mutual respect. The class will meet across three campus sessions and a closing offsite dinner. It will involve a collaborative exploration of primary and secondary sources, as well as custom conversations. Topics will include religion and cross-cultural lawyering, religion and legal systems, faith in judicial decision-making, and law as a vocation. Befitting the goals of the discussion series and the importance of bridge-building, this seminar is warmly and equally open to students of any religious tradition and those of no religion at all. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

This seminar will explore the portrayal of criminal lawyers in popular films and will engage in critical analysis of how misconceptions about the criminal justice system and biases against women, people of color and the poor are amplified on the big screen. Source materials will include numerous mass-market films juxtaposed against authoritative law review and other commentary to afford in-depth discussion. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

We will consider the developing legal and ethical problems of robots and artificial intelligence (AI), particularly self-directed and learning AIs. How do self-driving cars (or autonomous weapons systems) value human lives? How do we trade off accuracy against other values in predictive algorithms? At what point should we consider AIs autonomous entities with their own rights and responsibilities? And how can courts and legislatures set legal rules robots can understand and obey? This discussion seminar will meet four times during the Fall quarter. Meeting dates and times to be arranged by instructor. Elements used in grading: Attendance and class participation.

This discussion seminar will focus on racial factors in the criminal justice system, using the Central Park 5 case and the Netflix series "When They See Us" as the jumping off point for the discussion. Following each episode of the series, the seminar will discuss the investigation, the trial, incarceration and post incarceration experiences. Although there may be some readings, the primary material will be the Netflix series. Joining Professor Mills in each session will be Emily Galvin-Almanze. Emily is a Stanford Law graduate and former public defender, and as Co-Founder and Executive Director of Partners for Justice, she is the creator of the collaborative defense school of practice, which incorporates client-led and holistic defense principles into the everyday practice of law. She is currently working with jurisdictions around the nation to expand and re-define public defense. Participants may also include, depending on their availability, George Gascon, the recently elected progressive District Attorney in Los Angeles who has been a leader in the investigation of racism in enforcement of the laws, Mike Romano, who leads our Three Strikes Project, and one of the Three Strikers whose release was secured by Stanford's Three Strike Project. The first class will be at the Law School from (TBA). The remainder will likely be in San Francisco and transportation will be provided and will depart around (TBA) and return around (TBA) on (TBA).

Much of the basic structure of twenty-first-century American legal education was put in place by late nineteenth-century Harvard Law School Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell. This seminar will begin by examining the impetus for and nature of Langdell's reforms then consider various twentieth- and twenty-first-century critiques and modifications of legal education, including Duncan Kennedy's Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy and the work of critical race theorists like Patricia Williams and Lani Guinier. We will conclude by examining the most significant change within law schools over the past century, the rise of clinical legal education, reading parts of the Carnegie Report on Legal Education and Sam Moyn's recent critique of clinical education as well as a range of responses to his piece. Throughout the seminar, we will pay attention to the historical and social contexts out of which proposals for changing legal education arose as well as to how we might assess the contemporary structure of legal education in light of its history. This discussion seminar will meet four times during the Fall quarter. You will be notified of the meeting times by the instructor. Specific dates, time, and location will also be listed in "Notes" below. Elements used in grading: Attendance and class participation.

Reasonable people sometimes disagree. How can reflective individuals hope to evaluate those disagreements? Fundamental notions of justice and rationality seem to dominate particular traditions in different places and different times. How can a twenty-first century product of American or other cultures decide which of various compelling ideas of justice and rationality is most persuasive to us? How can anyone escape the accidents of birth and tribal worldview? We will approach these questions through Alastair MacIntyre's provocative book of that name: Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Univ. Of Notre Dame Press 1988). Whether or not MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelian approach to the fundamental questions of ethical theory ultimately prove persuasive, his attempt to find alternatives to the utilitarian and Kantian relics of the Enlightenment will, I hope, open a conversation about what we believe and why. This discussion seminar will meet four times during the Fall quarter. You will be notified of the meeting times by the instructor. Specific dates, time, and location will also be listed in "Notes" below. Elements used in grading: Attendance and class participation.