Courses

International Law (Fall 2007)

NOTE: You will need to be enrolled in this course with a valid icommons username and password to access the course website.

This course concerns the theoretical and doctrinal arguments which have structured thinking about international legal issues. It considers basic doctrines of public international law about the sources of law and the international legal process. We consider the use made of these materials in addressing such issues as human rights, environmental policy, terrorism, and war. The course compares the public international legal tradition with the neighboring fields of international institutions, international economic law and comparative law. We will examine both the history of international legal argument and contemporary scholarship, which is innovative and theoretical. We will focus on the various ways of thinking and talking about institution building and international dispute resolution and about the projects, personal and professional, visible in the discipline's basic doctrinal materials.

There is no prerequisite. In the past only about half of the students in the course, including many graduate students, have had some previous exposure to international law.

Materials: Damrosch, Henkin, Pugh, Schachter and Smit, International Law Cases and Materials (West 4th ed. 2001) and supplemental materials.

NOTE: You will need to be enrolled in this course with a valid icommons username and password to access the course website.

This short course will review a canonical set of materials from the American tradition of legal scholarship from Oliver Wendell Holmes to the present. We will try to see what, if anything, makes the North American way of thinking about law distinctive. Pragmatism? Policy science? Interdisciplinary work? We will look at the foundational texts for the major "schools" of American legal scholarship, including legal realism, legal process, law and economics, law and society, critical legal studies, and feminism. We will explore how the American tradition looks and how it has been received outside the United States, as well as the relations between this peculiar way of thinking about law and the American style of legal practice.

This course is designed for students interested in understanding how American jurists think. It has been designed to be particularly helpful for LL.M. students. Rather than an exam, the course will conclude with a very short (five-page maximum) reaction paper to one of the articles we have considered.

Materials: "The Canon of American Legal Thought," David Kennedy and William Fisher, Princeton University Press (2006)

Law and Development (Fall 2006)

NOTE: You will need to be enrolled in this course with a valid icommons username and password to access the course website.

This course will deal with past and present debates over the role of the legal order in economic development. After preliminary discussions of economists' theories of growth and legal theorists' views of law in society, we will focus on such issues as Third World nationalist regimes' attempts at regulation and planning, the role of the international trade regime, and the legal structures put in place during current transitions to a market economy through privatization. Limited enrollment. J.D. students may enroll only with the instructor's permission - those wishing to enroll should email a brief statement of their background and intellectual interest in the course to the instructor.

Materials: "The Process of Economic Development", 2nd Edition, James Cypher and James Dietz, eds. (Routledge, 2004) and supplemental materials.

NOTE: You will need to be enrolled in this course with a valid icommons username and password to access the course website.

This course will provide an overview of the European Union legal system. Students will be introduced to the major institutions and decision making procedures of the Union constitutional structure, as well as to the foundational doctrines and processes of the judicial system. The course will introduce students to a range of substantive problems of economic regulation and policy within the European Union. Although we will focus on environmental law, students will also work with cases which raise issues in a wide variety of topics such as environmental policy, antitrust regulation, intellectual property and other areas of regulation and policy in which the Union has been active.
The course is simulation based. Students will analyze and develop practice skills appropriate for legal work in a complex and cross-cultural institutional environment. We will examine the work done by lawyers who work with or in the Union institutions as judges, advocates, lobbyists, politicians, bureaucrats and private practitioners. Through simulations, demonstrations and case students based on actual practice experiences, students will work on the skills of factual development, drafting, oral argument, negotiation, persuasion and on-the-spot analytic thinking.
The course is co-taught by Dr. Jean-François Verstrynge, a career legal advisor with the Commission of the European Union in Brussels who has worked across a range of legal fields, most recently as Acting Director General for the Environment.

Academic Writers Workshop (Not Taught in 2006-2007)

In this course, we will analyze examples of legal scholarship written in various genres to explore what persuades, what innovates, and what contributes. The course is designed primarily for people with ongoing legal writing projects of their own: doctoral dissertations, LL.M. theses, Third-Year Papers, journal notes, etc. Participants will share their writing projects with one another and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of recent legal writings. We will pay particular attention to writing which seeks to innovate methodologically and which is interdisciplinary in character, drawing on historical, cultural, philosophical or economic background literatures, and materials. We will discuss the methodological difficulties of writing critically and analytically about law in these interdisciplinary styles. The instructor welcomes auditors.

Those wishing to take the course for credit will write a series of short response essays to the legal writings we discuss. There will be no exam. Those writing LL.M. Papers, Third-Year Papers, or doctoral dissertations under the instructor's supervision, and those reading for general doctoral exams with the instructor, are required either to audit or take the course for credit. Distributed materials.