INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW

LAW 802

Study a set of procedural concepts that are fundamental to legal practice in the U.S., including jurisdiction over parties, subject matter jurisdiction, and federal-state conflict of laws. In addition to learning key doctrines, engage in a theoretical inquiry into explanations of and justifications for those doctrines.

LAW 602

Overview of the institutions and entities that create legal documents in the U.S.; how these documents are organized and found in a law library; introduction to common law case analysis. Open only to Law LLM students or Visiting International students in the Law LLM Pathway.

HISTORY/LEGALST 261

Surveys the development of American law down to the U.S. Civil War. Reviews the English historical background, and examines how law changed in colonial America, culminating in the framing of the U.S. Constitution. Explores how territorial expansion, democracy, and slavery shaped nineteenth-century American law. Emphasis is on how law interacts with political, social, and cultural change, with a focus on the origins of modern civil and constitutional rights.

LAW 731

An introduction to the constitutional law of the United States covering the basic structure of government in the United States, with emphasis on the federal government. Includes the role of the federal courts and the doctrine of judicial review; the rise of federal power, as reflected particularly in shifting definitions of "interstate commerce," the doctrine of separation of powers, with emphasis on current issues of legislative and executive branch authority; and judicial and other limitations on the exercise of authority by the states as well as selected rights protected in the Amendments to the Constitution.

HISTORY/LEGALST 262

Surveys the development of American law from the Civil War to the early Twenty-First Century. After a review of the U.S. Constitution and its modification by the Civil War amendments, examine the legal dimensions of such topics as race relations and the Civil Rights movement, the growth of modern business, the New Deal, labor rights, the women's movement, the individual rights revolution of the postwar period, and the contemporary conservative reaction. Emphasis on how law interacts with political, social, and cultural change.