This seminar, led by Judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, explores selected topics in ethics and professional responsibility from a judicial perspective and the perspective of counsel providing individual representation to clients, including those accused of crimes. In this seminar, students will engage in robust discussion, work through ethical problems individually and in small groups, and consider how their future legal careers will reflect the highest ethical values required by the profession. Guest speakers will include judges and lawyers who confront issues of professional responsibility in their decision-making and practice.

Trial by jury in criminal and civil cases is a central component of the American legal system. However, over time, state and private actors have dramatically reduced the jury’s scope. Today, juries resolve only a small percentage of cases in the criminal and civil justice systems. In this short course, we will discuss the multiple causes of the decline in jury trials. We will examine jury selection and the conduct of jury trials to assess how well juries perform their democratic function. Finally, we will explore potential reforms that could help to restore the jury to its important place in our system of justice.

The course has two goals.  First, provide a general overview of the breadth of Federal Agricultural Law and its impact. Second, study how the principles Administrative Law, Appropriations Law, and Constitutional Law come together to shape Federal Agricultural Law and policy.

The economic analysis of law relies on rational choice theory as a starting point for predicting human behavior. However, social scientists have found that human behavior in the real world systematically deviates from the rational choice model’s predictions. The objective of this course is to consider the ways in which behavioral findings complement or modify the economic analysis of law. Students will be introduced to biases and heuristics that influence human behavior related to the law; critiques of behavioral law and economics; and behavioral insights from psychologists and economists in property, torts, contracts, criminal law, the decision-making of judges and jurors, and litigation.

This seminar examines timely issues in the investigation, prosecution, and defense of federal public corruption offenses. The seminar will challenge students to reason through statutory, doctrinal, and policy issues in practical, frequently encountered scenarios from both prosecutorial and defense perspectives, including parallel civil and criminal investigations, grand jury practice and defense investigations, attorney client privilege and joint defense agreements, and plea bargaining and sentencing issues.  This is a pass/fail course.

This course will explore the implications of several technological advancements for the evolution of the law. Emerging technologies in urban mobility such as autonomous vehicles provide helpful case studies for thinking about the impact of technology change, particularly that of the substitution of artificial intelligence for human decision-making, on the law. We will mostly focus on the legal, ethical, and policy implications of emerging technologies in urban mobility. Algorithms play a key role in many of the technological advancements we will discuss, and we will explore both the regulation of algorithms and regulation by algorithms.

This course will chronical the unique role, influence and history of the African American lawyer in the United States. For 225 years (1619-1844), there was not one African American lawyer in North America until Macon Bolling Allen was admitted to the bar in the State of Maine on July 3, 1844. Students will learn the personal and professional journeys of several distinguished African American lawyers who not only were masterful legal technicians, but also, were committed to forcing the legal system to live up to its creed: the promise of ‘equal justice under the law.’ 

This class is about the daily professional life of a nineteenth century circuit-riding attorney named Abraham Lincoln. Obviously, the man who sat in the White House was heavily influenced by the one who sat in a saddle on the Eighth Judicial Circuit, but this class is only concerned with the latter. Because of his presidency, nearly every day of Lincoln’s earlier professional life has been documented; this allows us a unique look into his profession. The digitization of documents from nearly every case he worked on allows us to see how a lawyer of his stature went about daily life – and how he, in particular, practiced law. What was the practice of law in mid-century Illinois like? How did it differ from that in, say, Boston, or New York, or even St. Louis? What was it like to ride the circuit? Study law? Take the bar?

This course will focus on the ways in which the U.S. Constitution regulates, or does not regulate, the selection of a President and Vice President every four years.  We will delve into, among other things, the origins and explanations of the so-called “Electoral College,” the independence, vel non, of presidential electors, modern reform efforts that could move the nation in the direction of a national-popular-vote system for presidential election, Vice-Presidential selection, presidential succession, the so-called Purcell doctrine, the respective roles of Congress and state governments in regulating presidential elections, the (related) “independent state legislature” theory, and the meaning and scope of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment as regards the office of the President.  We will not have a casebook for this course, but instead will use materials from a set of readings (cases, law review articles, online commentary, etc.) that the instructor has put together.  

This course is an introduction to how Congress and administrative agencies make law and to how courts interpret that law. The first half of the course examines the legislative process and statutory interpretation, including the use of dictionaries, legislative history, statutory purpose, canons of construction, and other interpretive tools to flesh out statutory meaning. The second half of the course turns to agencies’ implementation of statutes through regulations, addressing topics such as presidential control over agencies, notice-and-comment rulemaking, and judicial deference or nondeference to agencies. Lawyers working in virtually every practice area must routinely rely on statutes and regulations; this course aims to give students the understanding and tools they need to persuade courts to interpret statutes and regulations in their clients’ favor.