Civil Rights and Anti-Discrimination Law

Provides an overview of the Office of Civil Rights. Specifically, introducing the federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance from the Department of Education. Those civil rights laws include Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (race, color, and national origin), Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (discrimination on the basis of gender), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (discrimination on the basis of a disability).

Delves into Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's effort to dismantle the lingering effects of slavery and to align the Constitution with the promise in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." Focus is on the text of the Constitution and legal doctrine but also on the path-breaking litigation strategy developed and implemented by the NAACP to topple longstanding and pernicious precedent, including, especially, Plessy v. Ferguson, which approved government segregation of the races (the “separate but equal doctrine.”)

This course will give students further opportunities to develop their legal writing and analysis skills in the context of analyzing seemingly race neutral issues using Critical Race Theory (CRT) techniques. Such techniques include not only considering the race of those involved in the litigation, but also racial stereotyping, the case’s historical context, implicit bias, and other relevant factors that might implicate racial issues. The goal is to help students understand how the tenets of CRT can be useful as an analytical tool in crafting a legal analysis or argument.

Students will study the ways in which racism is embedded in the practice both of law and journalism and to see how the two fields can be used to challenge it. Students will begin the course by reflecting on their own biases before investigating and writing about an actual case.

This seminar explores the centrality of race as a foundational feature of American law. The study is cross-racial, comparative, and proactive, analyzing the converging and diverging experiences of indigenous peoples: Latinas/Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Pacific Americans, as well as different strategies for social justice.

This seminar examines the responsibilities and conduct of both prosecutors and law enforcement officers in the United States. We will cover topics including the role and responsibilities of prosecutors and police officers, various models of policing, forms of prosecutorial and police misconduct, legal claims that victims of such misconduct might bring against prosecutors and police officers, as well as defenses to those claims. We will discuss the merits and disadvantages of discretion in the criminal justice system and the value of mechanisms to constrain that discretion. We will think critically about various models used to hold prosecutors and police officers accountable for their conduct.

The Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization rejected the idea of a constitutional right to abortion grounded in substantive due process. Scholars and advocates have long argued, however, for the fundamental right to abortion based on alternative legal frameworks. This course will cover the basic liberty/privacy framework as announced in Roe v. Wade and rejected in Dobbs, but then expand the frame to consider some of these alternative frameworks – including those based on other constitutional provisions as well as those based on state constitutions, international law, and common law principles. 

A detailed study of one or more selected aspects of criminal procedure. The topics covered in recent years have included sentencing law, police accountability, and the jurisprudence of the death penalty.

This course will broadly study American poverty, poverty programs, and constitutional, federal, state, and municipal laws that directly affect the poor. Students will survey wealth disparities in the U.S. through demographic data relating to income, educational attainment, housing, access to medical care, and voting.

The language of law and the cultural support for legal analysis can have considerable influence on the construction of human behavior.  The law’s treatment of motherhood is an excellent example of this phenomenon.  Students in this class will explore the underlying basis for our legal system and how those principles may be affected and modified when coping with the contested notions of motherhood.

This course will include an overview of juvenile delinquency law, as well as criminal child abuse and neglect issues, and a comprehensive look at child abuse and neglect law and procedure, including termination of parental rights actions, relevant federal legislation, and interstate compacts. The course will also cover the major types of adoption - agency, relative, stepparent, independent, and adult - from adoption petition to entry of final decree and post-adoption issues.

This seminar is designed to examine concepts of race and racism and how they intersect historically and currently with law in the United States. It is intended to equip students to think critically about legal policy, practice, and analysis and how those areas impact race-related concerns. Typical topics have included concepts of race; race and constitutional interpretation; education; desegregation; and voting rights.

Introduces U.S. housing law and policy with a focus on low and moderate income tenants as well as homeowners. Examines the history of housing policies and problems, public housing and federally subsidized housing, habitability and code enforcement, foreclosure, gentrification, eviction, and fair housing law. Students will develop an understanding of the legal, social, and historic underpinnings of contemporary housing challenges, and how these insights inform advocacy strategies to promote housing justice.

In your legal practice, you will be exposed to race-related issues—in the facts of your cases; in your interactions with clients, opposing counsel, witnesses, judges, and jurors; and in the law itself. You will also face race-related issues in your professional life—in the policies and practices of the bar and your firm; in your interactions with colleagues; and in your attempts to gain and manage clients. This course explores the ways in which race is relevant to the law and legal practice, with an eye on what social science research can tell us. The course will also explore how you might be a leader on race issues in your professional life.

This course will examine how the law affects women’s lives in a number of different contexts. The class will consider a number of different areas, including but not limited to employment, education, family responsibilities, violence against women, and other issues affecting women’s bodies, including pornography and prostitution. The class will also review a number of feminist legal theories and issues relating to the intersection of gender with race and class.

This class explores a wide variety of issues related to sexual identity and sexual orientation, particularly as those issues continue to push the law to address the wide variations of patterns in which human beings relate. The course looks at the law as it both constricts societal development at times and acts as a catalyst for radical social change at other times. With the law as the starting point, the overarching questions that define the place of the gay person in American society will be examined. We will consider, among other topics, the regulation of sexuality, sexual orientation, gender roles, the workplace, the intersection of law and religion, same-sex relationships, and parenting. Much of the legal doctrine considered in this course will inevitably be constitutional in nature, including studies of the right to privacy, the First Amendment, and equal protection. The course will also touch on basic employment and family law doctrines as they relate to gay litigants. Apart from the substantive law, our doctrinal discussions will focus on a number of larger themes: the nature/nurture debate and its legal ramifications; the public/private distinction as exhibited in the legal conflicts between free expression and “coming out” and the “right to be let alone”; gender roles and their changing place in society; and the equality/diversity distinction, which arises in the context of assimilation versus difference.

The course will survey a range of American literature with a focus on works by African-American writers from ante-Bellum to the present. Students will juxtapose legal developments in the history of race relations in the U.S. from slavery, through the civil rights amendments to the Constitution, the black codes, Jim Crow, Harlem Renaissance, civil rights era, to the present. The course marries skills developed in law school with critical readings of literature and film to better understand the context of legal issues that might be encounter.