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This course addresses the role of the federal courts in the American system of federalism and separation of powers, as well as their role in the development of substantive federal law and constitutional rights. A central premise of the course is that the institutional, political, and constitutional features of federal litigation cannot be understood without engaging the historical and theoretical context, especially the social, political, and legal movements in response to which the federal courts have developed and related assumptions about structural constitutional theory (including federalism, supremacy, separation of powers, and judicial review). Thus while many of the traditional aspects of federal court jurisprudence will be covered (e.g., federal common law including implied rights of action, justiciability doctrines and other doctrines of restraint, congressional power to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts and to create "legislative courts" outside of Article III, Supreme Court review of judgments, state sovereign immunity, litigating against the government, and federal habeas corpus), the doctrine will be assessed from an interdisciplinary perspective, including social, political, and theoretical accounts that reveal how the courts and ordinary Americans have come to understand the distinctive role of the federal courts, as well as claims for expansion or contraction of their powers. The course is recommended for students interested in pursuing a career in litigation, government service, and/or judicial clerkships. Special Instructions: In Winter 2026 the Federal Courts class will be capped at 45 students and conducted in small group sessions of 5 students per group. Required class participation includes (a) weekly pre-recorded lectures introducing assigned materials, and (b) weekly small group sessions. The small group sessions are led by Professor Spaulding every week. Some groups will have their sessions during the regularly scheduled hours of the course, but most groups will meet in sessions scheduled during other mutually convenient time slots each week. (Scheduling software will be used to generate time slots for each group for the quarter and students' availability will be solicited). The readings and pre-recorded lectures must be completed before attending small group sessions. The small group sessions run approximately 70 minutes each week and will be led by Professor Spaulding in person assuming health regulations permit. If this is not possible, they will be conducted online. The goal of this format is to create an engaging, interactive, and intellectually rigorous setting for exploration of the course materials and themes. Note that class time is not used for basic exposition of cases -- students are expected to have used the readings and lectures to internalize the basic doctrine. We will instead use our sessions to focus on the hardest doctrinal and structural constitutional questions presented by the cases. Each group will cover a common set of 'hard questions,' so careful preparation is obligatory. There is usually some time for brief Q&A each week, but the sessions are not conducted as open-ended tutorials. Although none is a prerequisite, students generally report that it is useful to have taken some or all of the following classes: Advanced Civ Pro, Administrative Law, Con Law II, Criminal Procedure, Remedies. Elements used in grading: Grading will be based on attendance, participation, a short paper, and a take home final exam. Interested students should fill out a consent form indicating understanding of and interest in this format. Course Planning Note: The law school offers a standard format, open enrollment course in another quarter, so if you are not interested in the small group format or can't take the risk of consent admission in the winter quarter, please plan your academic year and course selection accordingly. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available at https://law.stanford.edu/education/courses/consent-of-instructor-forms/. See Consent Application Form for instructions and submission deadline.

This course examines the role of the federal courts in the American system of separation of powers and federalism. It explores the scope of the judicial power vested in federal courts and the constitutional and statutory principles that structure and limit that power. It also addresses how the judicial power may be used to develop substantive federal law and to safeguard fundamental constitutional rights. Topics likely to be studied include the doctrines of standing, ripeness, and mootness; congressional authority over the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts; Supreme Court review of state courts; federal common law; suits challenging official action, sovereign immunity, and official immunity; and habeas. The course is highly recommended for students interested in pursuing a judicial clerkship and/or a career in litigation. Willingness to participate in class discussion is a requirement of enrollment. Elements used in grading: class attendance, class participation, and in-school final exam.

German owned VW admits that it included a "defeat device" in the software for its diesel cars so they could fraudulently pass US environmental tests, and is sued by thousands of US consumers in state and federal courts in the US. Very quickly, the cases are consolidated in the federal court in Northern California. Meanwhile, special purpose foundations are established in the Netherlands to seek a settlement with VW on behalf of European consumers under the Dutch collective settlement act, and a securities lawsuit on behalf of investors whose share values have dropped dramatically is filed in Germany, using that country's special group litigation procedure. The Dutch foundations may be coordinating their actions with US lawyers, the shareholders in Germany are represented by the local partners of a leading US-based litigation boutique, and the shareholder suit is funded by a UK-based international litigation financing firm. In 2019, a jury in E.D. Va. delivers a verdict holding a former Somali army commander now living in the U.S. liable under the Torture Victim Protection Act for compensatory and punitive damages to a Somali citizen he injured 30 years ago. The plaintiff is represented by the Center for Justice & Accountability in San Francisco and DLA Piper lawyers serving pro bono; the witnesses include public and private actors from different countries. In 2011, US-based Apple sues Korea-based Samsung for patent infringement in N.D. CA and Samsung counter-sues in Korea, Japan and Germany. A year later more than 50 lawsuits are ongoing in more than 10 countries. Two years later the companies agree to drop their litigation outside the US and focus their resources on their US litigation battle. Apple wins a big judgment in the federal court in San Jose but Samsung appeals all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. SCOTUS rejects the appeal and remands and in Spring 2018 the case is on the calendar for the third time in San Jose. Philip Morris' Hong Kong subsidiary files a claim in an international arbitration tribunal charging that Australia's public health protection statute regarding tobacco marketing violates Australia's bi-lateral investment treaty with Hong Kong. The arbitration claim is filed after the parent company unsuccessfully challenged Australia's statute before the High Court. In December 2015 the arbitration tribunal rules that it does not have jurisdiction over Philip Morris' claim effectively dismissing it. But controversy over Philip Morris' and other multi-national corporations' attempts to use investment arbitration to challenge diverse health, safety and environmental protection regulations derails international trade negotiations and leads to efforts to establish an international court for investment disputes. To date, hundreds of climate change lawsuits have been filed in U.S. courts and other jurisdictions against governments and corporations. In many instances, the litigation is driven by NGOs and private lawyers working together across national boundaries, sharing information and strategies. These high-profile cases illustrate an important aspect of complex litigation: across many different substantive domains, in court and ADR proceedings, disputes that used to be contained within national borders are now trans-national. This seminar will consider the doctrinal, procedural and practical challenges that arise when litigation goes global. We will consider the high profile cases in which these issues have played out in recent years and hear from some of the lawyers (in-person or via zoom) who are creating a new virtual international court system for the resolution of global disputes. The goal of the seminar is to develop an understanding of how the global dimension of high-stakes complex disputes shapes parties' and lawyers' strategies and judges' decisions. The seminar will meet 3 times a week. A small number of seminar sessions will be conducted via zoom in collaboration with law faculty and students in Chile, the Netherlands and Germany, three countries that have adopted procedures for dealing with large-scale civil litigation in distinctive fashions. Students will prepare research papers focusing on litigation that has arisen in the U.S. or other national courts that reflects the special characteristics of global disputes. In the past students have researched cases ranging from securities and antitrust violations, consumer fraud, product liability, patent infringement, climate change and human rights violations, inter alia, and including disputes resolved in arbitration as well as courts. Special Instructions: Students on the waitlist for the course will be admitted if spots are available on the basis of priority and degree program. Elements used in grading: Class participation and course paper.

(Formerly Law 251) Instances are common in law where more than one legal authority potentially governs a particular event, occurrence or transaction. When the outcome required by these authorities differs, which law governs? Beginning with the classic problem of choosing an applicable law in cases with facts touching more than one jurisdiction, this course is designed broadly to explore the variety of theories and systems used to resolve this question. The course thus uses state/state conflicts to develop a set of approaches and then extends these to such other problems as adjudicatory jurisdiction, judgments, federal subject-matter jurisdiction, and public and private international law. Elements used in grading: Attendance, preparation, participation and final examination.

Arbitration, once narrowly defined as a party-selected method for resolving contract-based disputes arising out of commercial transactions, is now ubiquitous. In the U.S. in addition to resolving run-of the-mill commercial disputes, arbitration may be used to resolve claims invoking anti-trust, securities, and civil rights law, and consumers, employees, patients and other individual claimants may be held to arbitration provisions included in form contracts drafted by corporations that the individuals overlooked or barely understood. Businesses too may find themselves held to an arbitration clause hastily chosen by a transactional lawyer who didn't understand what she was committing her client to. Economic globalization has created increased demand for international commercial arbitration, which offers binding resolution of trans-national business disputes, enforceable in virtually every court in the world. The increased frequency of complex high-value international transactions involving key industries -- e.g. energy and telecommunications -- has led to an increasing fraction of transnational business disputes with a significant public policy dimension. Moreover, the desires of countries with less developed economies to attract foreign direct investment has led to the creation of a specialized form of arbitration for disputes between private investors and states. Often bundled with other forms of alternative dispute resolution ("ADR") such as mediation, arbitration is actually a rule-defined adjudicative procedure, in which parties submit their disputes to privately-chosen and privately-paid decision-makers who deliver binding (and usually unappealable) outcomes, often in closed proceedings. The law that governs arbitration is a mix of domestic statutes (e.g., in the U.S., the Federal Arbitration Act) and international conventions (e.g., the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States ("ICSID")) that have been entered into by a large majority of countries. Today, arbitration offers a challenging and lucrative practice area to lawyers representing corporations in multiple industries, in domestic and international contexts, and to lawyers serving as arbitrators, who often command high hourly rates. Understanding the differences and similarities among arbitration law and practice in multiple domains and the intersection of public and private law is valuable to lawyers who specialize in arbitration. This seminar is intended for students who wish to develop this capacity as well as for students who want to understand better how to draft business contracts that will protect their clients should they find themselves subject to arbitration. Although arbitration is well-accepted around the world, certain applications of arbitration have become increasingly controversial. In the U.S. the requirement that employees agree to arbitrate sexual harassment claims as a condition of employment has led to boycotts against "big law" firms. Requirements to arbitrate disputes between private investors and national governments have knocked high-profile multi-lateral trade negotiations off-track. Some business decision-makers are turning away from arbitration for "ordinary" commercial disputes, arguing that it has become as expensive and time-consuming as court adjudication, without the protections of the latter. In this course we will consider separately and together, the statutes that provide the legal framework for arbitration, the specific rules that govern different types of arbitration, the ongoing controversies evoked by some of these rules and their application, and the reforms that have been proposed in response to these controversies. We will read and discuss U.S. case law, international arbitration decisions, academic commentary and empirical analyses of arbitration use and consequences, and hear from leading arbitration practitioners. Students will select aspects of arbitration law or practice or the controversies that surround it and write three reflection papers on specified topics (Section 01) or research papers on their topic of interest (Section 02). After the term begins, students accepted into the course can transfer from section (01) into section (02), which meets the R requirement, with consent of the instructor. Elements used in grading: Attendance, class participation, and reflection papers, or final research paper.

This advanced course in structural constitutional law builds on concepts, doctrines, and themes developed in Federal Courts. Modern doctrines attempting to reconcile federalism, the supremacy of federal law, separation of powers, and the specific jurisdictional limitations of Article III judicial power raise complex questions about the nature and scope of judicial review, remedies, the adversary system, and alternatives to adjudication, among other subjects. This course is designed to allow students to deepen their expertise and explore discrete topics in a tutorial-style format with the instructor. Individual topics will be selected on the basis of student interest in consultation with the instructor, appropriate reading will be selected for analysis and discussion (generally by using a canonical or innovative text as a springboard), and students will be guided in the development of novel doctrines, theories, and practical solutions to some of the most vexing issues in the field. Evaluation will be based on participation in mentored research and tutorial engagement as well as the creativity, prose quality, and persuasiveness of the paper. Students may take the course for 1-3 units. The paper requirement is 10-12 pages for each unit. Student electing 2 or 3 units should enroll in Section 02 (which can count for R-credit). Class sessions to be scheduled in harmony with students' other course commitments. Elements used in grading: Written Assignments, Final Paper. Prerequisite: Federal Courts. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available on the SLS website (Click Courses at the bottom of the homepage and then click Consent of Instructor Forms). See Consent Application Form for instructions and submission deadline.

Although easy to lose sight of in the midst of the Coronvirus epidemic, the United States is in the midst of an opioid addiction epidemic. More than 10 million Americans 12 years and older are estimated to have misused opioids in 2018, most of which misuse was linked to prescription drugs. Approximately 47,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses in that year. Opioid use is reported to have peaked in 2011 but opioid addiction remains a problem in many parts of the country (CNN Editorial Research, "Opioid Crisis Fast Facts," June 21, 2020, available at https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/health/opioid-crisis-fast-facts/index.html). The opioid crisis presents a variety of public policy challenges. Like the Crack epidemic of the 1980s, opioid misuse has had disproportionate effects on certain communities. While the former disproportionately affected poor Black urban communities and other urban communities of color, the latter has primarily affected poor White communities, particularly in non-coastal areas of the country. The former was met with popular criticism of its victims and draconian criminal justice policies that incarcerated a generation of Black Americans and other people of color. The latter has been met with an outpouring of concerned media commentary, and funding (however insufficient) for public treatment programs. It is difficult not to conclude that systemic engrained racism explains much of this difference. The opioid crisis also differs from the crack crisis, however, in that opioid victims and their advocates have been able to target responsible parties and attempt to hold them accountable for the harm and losses their conduct has imposed on addicts, their families and their communities. It is widely agreed that the origin of the epidemic was the virtually unlimited distribution of prescription opioid drugs, allegedly encouraged by the drug manufacturers and enabled by other corporations in the pharmaceutical supply chain and by the physicians who prescribed the drugs. The opioid epidemic has also led to a wide-ranging litigation, which has taken as its role model earlier litigation against tobacco manufacturers and ongoing litigation against gun manufacturers. The opioid litigation stands as an example of joining private and public civil litigation to claim compensation for losses due to alleged wrongdoing by private corporations and in the process reshape public policy with regard to harm. To prevail against defendants, plaintiffs have had to persuade courts to apply liability doctrine in unusual although not entirely new ways. Much of the litigation resulting from opioid overdoses and addiction has been contested in the federal courts, which have deployed an armamentarium of formal and informal procedural rules and practices developed over the past several decades to manage and resolve large-scale litigation. Innovative approaches have been adopted by the federal judge assigned to manage the litigation. Key defendants have chosen to manage their liability by seeking the protection of the bankruptcy courts. In sum, the opioid litigation offers opportunities to consider the roles of socio-economic inequality and racial attitudes in shaping perceptions of harm, the potential of tort law to provide remedies for losses, and the challenge of pursuing remedies for mass loss in federal courts. Through readings, guest lectures, discussion and individual research papers on relevant topics of your choice, this seminar will provide both practical information about litigating mass tort claims and space to consider the appropriate role of courts in solving social policy problems. Attendance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper.

This one-credit seminar is the creation of Professors Joan Picó i Junoy and Juan Antonio Andino López, of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona-Spain). The sessions will be held by Professor Andino, who will aim to enable students to compare the evidence principles of the common law, as practiced in the U.S. and U.K. and some British Commonwealth Countries, with the civil law evidence principles embraced in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The course will benefit students who someday may take part in transnational litigation or business transactions or will engage in cross-cultural research. After a brief historical review of the development of these two procedural traditions, our focus will shift to an overview of civil law evidentiary principles with emphasis on the roles of the judge and parties in preparing the evidence. Then we take up a comparison of rules governing character evidence, witness competency, hearsay, and scientific evidence, as well as evidentiary privileges and standards and burdens of proof. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Class Participation, Final Paper. Class meets January 7, 9 and 16 (4:15 to 6:15); January 14 (4:15 to 7:15).

When you first encounter civil procedure in your 1L fall quarter, it may seem dry and technical. If you take advanced procedure or complex litigation or do a summer clerkship in litigation, you will move on to considering the more interesting strategic use of procedural rules. But, with so much to learn so fast there often isn't time to talk about the political economy dimension of the rules. Moreover, for reasons we will discuss in this seminar, the rules are conventionally presented as neutral, notwithstanding the fact that they determine who gets access to court, for what types of claims, and with what sorts of potential outcomes. In fact, the civil procedure rules have huge distributional consequences: some sorts of claims and claimants are advantaged and some are disadvantaged by them. Not surprisingly, then, the rule drafting process is dominated by interest group politics and in recent decades, key U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting civil procedure rules have been shaped by the justices' ideological preferences. At the same time, the procedural rules affect the efficiency of the litigation process: how fast disputes are resolved and at what cost, which are important to litigants on both sides of the v. Hence, there are non-ideological as well as ideological rationales for certain rules and rule interpretations. In this seminar, we will consider the distributional consequences of the rules that shape the key stages of the civil litigation process, focusing on the pretrial stage at which most civil disputes are resolved. We will read key rules, selected court decisions interpreting their application, and commentary on interpretation (some empirically grounded), focusing on political economy perspectives. Where source materials exist, we will discuss interest group lobbying for and against rule changes and who won and lost these interest group competitions. I also hope to have a few guest speakers who have been "on the ground" as these efforts took place join us to share their observations. Our topics will include the composition of and appointment to the Civil Rules Advisory Committee, pleading rules, enforcement of mandatory pre-dispute arbitration contract clauses, discovery, summary judgment, class action certification and settlement approval, and third-party litigation financing. During the quarter, students will choose 2 - 3 topics from our syllabus and write brief (6-8 page) reflection papers considering their anticipated distributional consequences and efficiency arguments for those rules, referring inter alia to syllabus materials on relevant interest group efforts and empirical research (if any). This 2-credit seminar requires two papers. Students may earn 1 additional unit of credit by writing a third paper and registering for Directed Research with Professor Hensler. To register for additional credit, please complete the Directed Research Petition available at https://law.stanford.edu/education/courses/forms-and-petitions/. Papers must be submitted on the FRIDAY of the week before the session at which your chosen topic is discussed. Each student will also lead ONE discussion session on a topic of their choice. Depending on the number of students, these sessions may be led by one or several students collaboratively. Students are expected to attend all seminar sessions. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Class Participation, Written Assignments.