American Legal Expansion -- the Nineteenth Century

Instructor: Christopher Tomlins

Telephone: 312 988 6553

Email address: clt@abfn.org

Credit Hours: 2.0

Maximum enrollment: 6 (from law school)

Semester: Fall 1999

Description: This is an advanced reading/discussion seminar in American legal
history, focusing on the "long" nineteenth century (that is, the period from the
creation of the American Republic to 1900). The seminar will take as its point of
departure the position that the nineteenth century is a period of formation or
"growth" in American law, and will consider the relationship between American
legal development and American expansion. It will explore the "expansion" of law
in three contexts: (1)governmental - the expansion of the American state as a
legal-political entity in the century following the creation of the Republic; (2) spatial
- the legal dynamics of the colonization of the continental US, including westward
movement and settlement, the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the
control of immigration; and (3) social/cultural - the extent (and limits) of law's
colonization and transformation of key institutions of American society (the
household, the factory, the plantation) and culture (sex, work, punishment).
Readings will be extensive (we will read and discuss about ten books during the
course). The course will be taught on the Arts and Sciences "quarter system"
calendar, commencing in late September, rather than the law school's semester
calendar. However, weekly meetings will be long enough (2 hrs 20 minutes) to
meet the law school's rules for 2 credit hours.

Method of instruction: Discussion, with student presentations.

Method of evaluation: Two short papers focusing on specific book
assignments. One longer research paper.

Professor agrees to supervise the following graduation writing
requirements:

1 draft paper

****

Winter 2000

Sociology of Law: Law in the Life Course

Professor John Hagan

Course Description: This course is concerned with the role that law plays in the direction of human lives. Topics considered in the course include the development of women and mens' careers as lawyers; pathways and turning points in the evolution of juvenile and adult criminal careers; the roles of courts and sanctions in shaping criminal careers; and links between law resistance and social activism across the life course. The focus of the course is on how to conceptualize and undertake research that gauges the impact of law in influencing life experiences and outcomes.

Evaluation: Students are required to write short reviews (2-3 pages) of each of the five monographs considered in the course (20% of final mark) and to prepare a major paper on a topic involving law and life course issues (80% of final mark).

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Fall 2000

THE POLITICS OF CIVIL JUSTICE
Law 683/Sociology 479

Fall Term, 2000?2001

Instructor Stephen Daniels

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Reform of the civil justice system, it seems, has become a permanent fixture of the political agenda. By early 2000, it made its entry into the presidential race when Governor George W. Bush used the issue in the South Carolina Republican primary. Nearly ten years earlier, the title of a National Law Journal was already characterizing it as "The Hundred Years' (Tort) War." In response to claims about the consequences of a litigation explosion, lawsuit abuse, skyrocketing jury awards, unscrupulous attorneys and so on, Congress and most state legislatures have passed some kind of civil justice or tort reform. Starting with how civil justice reform came to be defined as a public policy problem and the surrounding interest group activity, this course examines civil justice reform as an illustration of the intimate connection between law and politics. In so doing, it will look at the empirical literatures from a number of disciplines touching on key issues in the reform debate: litigiousness, juries, contingency fee lawyers, experts and scientific evidence, medical malpractice, products liability and punitive damages. Examples would include studies from political science on agenda?setting in the public policy process; studies from sociology and anthropology on why injured people decide to litigate or not; studies from psychology on jury decision?making; and studies from economics and sociology on medical malpractice. The readings will draw from scholars who take different positions on civil justice reform; from some of the interest groups involved; and from scholars who take no position at all.

TEACHING METHOD

The course will be conducted as a seminar in which we will critically discuss the readings and the policy issues involved. Each student will be responsible for leading the discussion on at least one topic.

EVALUATION METHOD

Students will write a paper critically examining some issue related to civil justice reform. The paper is worth 80% of the grade, with the remaining 20% coming from class participation.

1. Introduction: Civil Justice as a Public Policy Problem
2. Interest Groups and Agenda-Setting: Defining a Policy Problem
3. Public Opinion and How It is Shaped
4. Consequences of the Crisis/Virtues of Reform
5. Litigiousness
6. Plaintiffs= Lawyers
7. Science and Expert Witnesses
8. Juries-I
9. Juries-II
10. The Politics of Research: The Exxon Studies

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Spring 2001

LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCE:
COMPETITION AND COMPLEMENTARITY IN THE FIELD OF LAW

Instructors: Bryant Garth, American Bar Foundation
Victoria Woeste, American Bar Foundation

This course will focus both on what social science contributes to the study of law and legal institutions and on how social science and the law relate. Social science, in other words, provides tools to understand the construction, operation, and legitimation of laws and legal institutions, but at the same time social science is used by legal actors to provide credibility and to legitimate normative legal positions. The tools that we will examine include history, neo-institutional sociology, structural sociology, institutional political science, empirical economics, linguistic anthropology, social psychology, and what can be called "law and context." What follows is a layout of readings and themes. The first class will be an introduction to the field. Readings that refer to a "chapter" are from the ABF textbook that is now in progress. We will meet weekly in seminar format.

The students will be evaluated on the basis of class participation, very short papers, and a final paper.

Topics for course:
1. Competition and cooperation in law and social science
2. The legal profession
3. Studying legal education and its role in the production of lawyers
4. Studying discrimination and its remedies
5. Crime and criminal justice
6. Personal injury lawyers and the litigation explosion
7. Juries and Administrative Decision-Makers
8. Social science and substantive legal fields
9. Legal needs and legal consciousness
10. Judges
11. Discuss Papers and Conclusions

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Winter 2001

Socio-legal Approaches to Discrimination

10 weeks
Winter 2001

Robert Nelson Laura Beth Nielsen

Overview:

In this seminar we will critically assess current theories and empirical analyses of discrimination and anti-discrimination law. The central question it will explore is: what is the relationship between discrimination law and inequality in American society? While the main focus in readings will be employment discrimination, other forms of discrimination may be considered. Among the topics to be covered are: the judicial, legislative, and regulatory politics of anti-discrimination law; the relationship between different kinds of inequalities (age, disability, gender, race, sexual orientation) and different regimes of anti-discrimination law; the dynamics of anti-discrimination litigation; the role of social science in judicial and regulatory decisions concerning discrimination; and the impact of anti-discrimination law on organizational personnel practices and inequality outcomes. We hope the seminar will include graduate students from the social sciences and law students. The course will run according to the schedule for winter quarter, but will meet on the law school campus. Law students may take the course for 2 or more credits, depending on the scope of their research projects. We will entertain multi-draft papers.

Course Requirements:

Students will be evaluated on their class participation and their course paper.
Students should come to class prepared to participate in classroom discussion. Each student will be responsible for preparing questions and leading class discussion one week during the quarter.
Students are expected to complete a research project on a topic of their choosing related to discrimination. The specific topic need not be one covered during the course, but must be approved by the instructors. Papers should be about 20 pages for those taking the course for 2 credits, and about 30 pages for those taking the course for 3 credits.