31 - 40 of 873 results for: LAW

This group will discuss human reproduction in the remaining three quarters of the 21st century, with a glance back at its first quarter and at the 20th. We will talk about ethical, legal, and social issues arising from abortion, the moral and legal status of human embryos and fetuses, eugenics, embryo selection, embryo editing, ectogenesis, "depopulation," and more. An underlying theme will be how "we" -- as a culture, as a legal system, as legal systems, and as individuals -- decide what should and shouldn't be done. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

This discussion seminar will explore legal issues in the 2020 election. We will read the cases or litigation materials as they are filed. The discussion group will also consider the various logistical, administrative, and civil rights issues that jurisdictions are confronting as they attempt to run an election during a pandemic. Students may also participate in the work of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project (see HealthyElections.Org) which is dedicated to studying and implementing best practices in election administration to deal with the challenges the COVID pandemic poses. 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.

In this reading group we will examine the intimate connection between the nation's retreat from Reconstruction in the 1870s, the constrained interpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments adopted by the Supreme Court, and the development of national and regional rituals that embedded a specific understanding of the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction in public spaces, most prominently, monuments to Union and Confederate military officers and Civil War battlefields. We will examine 20th century resistance to the forms of historical consciousness embedded in the architecture of these public spaces, 21st century movements to remove and replace this architecture and associated cultural representations of white supremacy, as well as longstanding debates in this and other cultures about how atrocities are remembered, and the socio-legal aspects of holding perpetrators to account. A central objective will be to interrogate the relationship between collective memory, identity, and legal interpretation, including "monumental" and "hagiographic" styles of legal reasoning. 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.

There is a tendency to think of technology as value neutral, as a set of essentially objective tools that people use, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, particularly when questions of race and racial justice are involved. But are the technologies we develop and deploy really neutral? Or might they be shaped by historical prejudices, biases, and social inequalities? To what extent is technology perhaps no less biased and racist than the underlying society in which it exists? We will consider these questions and more in the context of a wide range of technologies, including risk assessment algorithms for bail, predictive policing, and other decisions in the criminal justice system; facial recognition systems; surveillance tools; algorithms for medical diagnosis and treatment decisions; targeted online housing ads that result in "digital redlining;" programs that determine entitlement to credit or public benefits and/or purport to detect fraud by recipients; algorithms used in recruiting and hiring; social-media targeting and disinformation; digital divide access gaps; and more. We will seek to articulate a framework for understanding how bias in tech might occur and how it might be related to racism and discrimination more broadly in our society. Finally, we will explore how these problems might be addressed, including by regulators, legislators, and courts as well as by technology developers and educators. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation

In this seminar, we will explore the evolution in the mid-twentieth century of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, at the same time that the international system for legal protection of human rights was also taking shape. Readings will discuss issues such as the relationship between civil and political rights and economic, social, and cultural rights; the relationship between anti-colonial movements and anti-racism; the context of the Cold War; the development of treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; and U.S. attitudes of exceptionalism towards international legal regimes. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation. The seminar will meet four times during the Fall quarter. Class will meet 6:45-8:45pm, September 14, October 5, October 19, November 2.

This seminar will focus on the abolitionist agenda for prisons and policing, and on the competing calls to reform those institutions. We will also consider the comparison case of the death penalty, where efforts at reform have often, but not always, been seen as stepping stones on the path toward abolition. We will read arguments for and against abolition, and for and against reform. Our main goal will not be to decide who we think is right, or which arguments we find most congenial. Instead, we will try to understand the thinking on both sides of these debates, and to see what value, if any, we can find even in the arguments we disagree with. We will also be asking whether the authors fairly characterize, and productively engage with, positions contrary to their own. In other words, we will be studying the debates between abolitionists and reformers in criminal justice not just to learn something about prisons, policing, and the death penalty, but also to reflect on the possibilities and prerequisites for constructive discussion of contentious issues in a splintered society. Class meets 5:00 PM-7:00 PM on Sept. 28, Oct. 12, Nov. 2, Nov. 16. Elements used in grading: Full attendance, reading of assigned materials, and active participation.

Scholars' and policy makers' thinking about political economy evolves as one understanding of the role of government ceases to reflect people's aspirations and views of social reality and is superseded by another. The laissez faire thinking of the 19th century was replaced by Keynesian management in response to the Great Depression. After WWII, Keynesian thinking was challenged, by 'neoliberalism'---a challenge that began to achieve success in the 1970s in response to perceived failures of government, high inflation, and other economic and social woes. By the mid-1980s, neoliberalism had become the new conventional wisdom, and liberals as well as conservatives accepted its core premises: that society consists of atomized individuals competing rationally to advance their own interests; that this behavior, in aggregate, produces good social outcomes and economic growth; that free markets are therefore the best way to allocate societal resources and government should intervene only to remedy market failures. Disagreements about what constitutes such failures and about corrective interventions persisted, but the general premises were widely embraced by policymakers and politicians. Today, that consensus is breaking down. Neoliberal policies and the particular systems of capitalism that accompany them have generated profound wealth inequality and have little to offer to address the perceived threats of globalization, climate change, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics. The coronavirus pandemic has only served to highlight these and other problems.But what should come next? Our readings in the course will explore a variety of themes related to these issues. How did neoliberalism come to dominate political discourse? What are its core tenets? What kinds of challenges are being presented to them, and what might alternative approaches to political economy for the 21st century look like? 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.

Lawsuits for compensation for personal injury often provide lay people with their first -- or even only -- interaction with the civil side of courts. Those interactions are rarely wholly happy, raising fundamental issues for plaintiffs about the definition of just desserts and fair procedure. There is a rich literature on these personal encounters, some autobiographical and others written by journalists who were given permission to closely follow victims' efforts to obtain compensation. These accounts paint a different picture of the tort liability regime than the one which 1Ls usually encounter in their Fall Torts course, which in recent decades have foregrounded a "law & economics" perspective that focuses on deterring defendants rather than on satisfying victims' desires for justice. In each session we will read a book about an individual's or family's personal encounter with tort law. Candidate books for discussion include an autobiographical take on the author's experience suing doctors for malpractice after her husband's untimely death, a journalist's close account of a working class family's pursuit of compensation for the death of their infants, a holocaust victim's response to the outcome of a class action against Swiss Banks, a journalist's account of a community seeking compensation and accountability for toxic exposure from a pharmaceutical facility. We'll each read the selected book for the session and discuss what the account tells us about the operation of tort law (and civil procedure) in real life and what potential legal reforms it suggests, if any. Each session will be led by one or two students who volunteer (at the beginning of the quarter) to start off and guide the discussion. Writing requirement: One short (5 or so pages) reflection paper on one of the assigned books or another related book of your choice. If you choose to reflect on a different book, it should also be an account of laypersons' experiences with the tort liability system (not a doctrinal analysis of tort law). 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, written assignment.

This reading group will examine the force of law -- the ways in which law both depends upon and abjures violence, the ways it suppresses and invites resistance, and the identity of subjects against whom legal violence is deployed. A central object of focus will be excessive force, the legal doctrines that insulate government officers from accountability, and the ways this specific form of violence is tied to racial subordination. We will also attend to the role of force in non-violent resistance movements, the role of vulnerability in resistance movements (both revolutionary and reform-oriented), and problems of revictimization in rights assertion. Readings will be drawn from a wide range of interdisciplinary sources including law, history, political theory, critical race theory, fiction, and psychology. 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.