The Constitution in American History
Semester: Spring
Offered: 2023
This seminar will examine the political and legal history of the U.S. Constitution, with an eye toward considering how ordinary people have fought to participate in the acts of constitutional amendment and interpretation. Readings will focus on constitutional conventions, alternative constitutions, constitutional amendments, U.S. Supreme Court cases, and the constitutional objectives of political movements, across history, and across the political spectrum.
Capitalism’s Hardwiring: Money, Credit, and Finance in a Globalizing World
Semester: N/A
Offered: 2022
This year-long seminar takes capitalism’s monetary hardwiring as its subject. Twice within the last two decades, the United States has kicked the monetary apparatus that formats its economy into crisis gear. Each time, the government leapt to rescue a financial infrastructure that had grown indispensable to modern markets even as it escaped the mooring of the “real economy.” The crises we experience immediately expose a system fashioned over centuries. In the seminar, we will explore capitalism’s hardwiring, defined broadly to include those architectures of finance and credit that today so profoundly shape material distribution, political voice, and disciplinary knowledge. The seminar will focus on the United States but locate that experience as part of a global drama, one that travels from the domestic law on bank liabilities to the geography of the Gold Standard, from the human tragedy of slave mortgages to the disembodied dynamics of foreign exchange markets, and from the parochial assumptions of theorists to the universalizing abstractions of their theory.
Legal History Workshop: Intimacy and the Law
Semester: Spring
Offered: 2022
This workshop aims to provide students with a historical perspective on the intersections between law and society in the United States. Assignments and class discussions will feature a mix of major works in the field of legal history, introducing students to critical methodologies and historiographical debates, and workshop presentations by leading historians writing on the legal regulation of intimacy, including such topics as abortion rights, marriage, sexuality, and family life.
Legal History Workshop: Race and Policing in Historical Context
Semester: N/A
Offered: 2019
This workshop aims to provide students with a historical perspective on the intersections between law, race, and police institutions in the United States. Assignments and class discussions will feature a mix of major works in the field of legal history, introducing students to critical methodologies and historiographical debates, and workshop presentations by leading historians currently writing on questions of race and policing. Students also have the opportunity to present research findings and complete substantial papers.
Legal History Workshop
Semester: Spring
Offered: 2019
This workshop will examine major works in the field of legal history, important historiographical debates and critical methodologies. Students will participate in workshop presentations by leading scholars. Law students have a choice of enrolling in the workshop for two or three credits. Law students who choose to write a substantial paper will receive three credits upon successful completion of the course; law students who do not complete substantial papers will receive two credits. All FAS graduate students who enroll in the workshop must complete a substantial paper; all FAS students will receive three credits upon successful completion of the course. This course is jointly-listed with FAS as History 2475.
Property
Semester: Fall
Offered: 2018
This course deals with characteristic arrangements under American law for the creation and transfer of rights to control and exploit property. The relationships of these arrangements to efficient resource use, the pattern of wealth distribution, and other social concerns will be explored as they are reflected in both judicial decision-making and legislative reform. Topics will cover aspects of commercial land transfers such as leases, conveyances, recording, and other methods of title assurance; the role of property law in producing and remedying racial and economic inequality; private land use planning methods; and zoning, health and safety regulations, and takings doctrine. The historical categories and assumptions of American real property law will be considered with a view to examining their relevance to modern social and economic conditions.
Legal History: History of American Economic Regulation
Semester: Fall
Offered: 2018
This course examines the history of capitalism in America, viewed through the lens of debates over regulation of economic activity. Beginning in the early days of the republic, it will examine the role of law in capitalist development, focusing on debates over the regulation of corporations, banking and the financial system, antitrust, and administrative law, continuing through the regulatory reforms of the New Deal. It will then examine movements for deregulation, the roots of the financial crisis, and recent proposals to regulate banks and other financial institutions. The course will examine the social, institutional and intellectual history of economic regulation.
Critical Race Theory
Semester: Spring
Offered: 2018
This course will consider one of the newest intellectual currents within American Legal Theory — Critical Race Theory. Emerging during the 1980s, critical race scholars made many controversial claims about law and legal education — among them that race and racial inequality suffused American law and society, that structural racial subordination remained endemic, and that both liberal and critical legal theories marginalized the voices of racial minorities. Course readings will be taken from both classic works of Critical Race Theory and newer interventions in the field, as well as scholarship criticizing or otherwise engaging with Critical Race Theory from outside or at the margins of the field.
Legal History: History of Capitalism in the Americas
Semester: N/A
Offered: 2015
This year-long seminar focuses on the history of modern capitalism. As modern capitalism becomes dominant across the globe, the need to understand it increases. Is it a form of market organization, a material or social phenomenon, an epistemological development, a set of legal categories, or a mode of governance? This seminar explores modern capitalism as an historical form of political economy, developed over the last three centuries, that may partake of all these dimensions. The seminar is designed to include both students who are interested in the in-depth study of capitalism as a political economic form, and faculty/scholars already engaged in that research who seek a forum for presenting works-in-progress. Student participants will be required to submit a final paper of twenty-five to thirty pages. Law students may write papers that satisfy Option 1 of the JD Written Work Requirement in conjunction with the seminar. Cross-registrants are encouraged to apply.
The seminar will include sessions focused on influential works that have contributed a working vocabulary to current debates over capitalism. In alternating sessions, we will discuss new research by faculty, associated scholars, and guests. The seminar will run biweekly during the Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 semesters. This seminar is cross-listed with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and is offered in conjunction with the annual workshop sponsored by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. In addition to law students, participants will include graduate students, Warren Center fellows, and guest speakers.