Both judicial decisions and commentary are used, although the case method is emphasized. This course uses Plato's Gorgias to raise the question of whether practical thinking is possible and considers responses to this question by such writers as Aristotle, Cicero, and Machiavelli. We study the methods and concepts that each writer uses to defend the cogency of legal, deliberative, or more generally political prudence against explicit or implicit charges that practical thinking is merely a knack or form of cleverness. This course is an introduction to the constitutional doctrines and political role of the U.S. Supreme Court, focusing on its evolving constitutional priorities and its response to basic governmental and political problems, including maintenance of the federal system, promotion of economic welfare, and protection of individual and minority rights. This course examines selected civil rights and civil liberties decisions of U.S. courts with particular emphasis on the broader political context.
Areas covered include speech, race, and gender.
This course examines the ways American law has treated legal issues involving race. The case method is used, although close attention is paid to litigation strategy and judicial opinion. This course examines Francis Bacon's methods of legal and scientific reasoning in order to understand his attempt to make science and law simultaneously more rational and universal, on the one hand, and more useful and adequate to particular judgments and circumstances, on the other. We address such issues as whether law can attain to the rigor of science, how rhetoric affects judgment of legal and practical matters, and whether different forms of law can be accommodated to one another by the development of legal maxims. We also read Edward Levi's Introduction to Legal Reasoning, along with some of the cases it mentions, in order to contrast Bacon's understanding of legal reasoning in the context of English law with a formulation concerning the operation of legal reasoning in our own context.