What is the law’s role in both perpetuating and eradicating injustice against sexual minorities (lesbians, gays, bisexual, and asexual persons) and gender minorities (non-cisgender persons)? This weekly seminar will examine the complex and evolving relationships between law, LGBTQ status, and anti-LGBTQ discrimination. Across the semester, we will work through three interrelated projects: (1) Surveying the history of LGBTQ rights litigation, focusing on major cases, legal strategies, key arguments, doctrinal issues, and their sociopolitical contexts; (2) Examining how anti-equality campaigns have used the law to generate, maintain, and legitimize injustices against gender and sexual minorities, even as LGBTQ persons have used the law to pursue equal citizenship; and (3) Mapping the extra-legal ideologies, narratives, and assumptions underlying contemporary legal disputes over LGBTQ equality. We’ll complete the projects by working through key flashpoints, including sex-segregated facilities and athletics, same-sex marriage, bans on military service, healthcare access, and religious exemptions from antidiscrimination protections.

Introduction to the field of legal anthropology. Addresses anthropological theories of the nature of law and disputes, examines related studies of legal structures in non-Western cultures, and considers the uses of anthropology in studying facets of our own legal system.   Meets with ANTH 560.

Sequence and Prerequisites: None.

This seminar will take a broad look at how policing and race interact. We will read selections from books, articles or speeches of people such as Michelle Alexander, Paul Butler, Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Comey, Alice Goffman, Jill Leovy, Tracey Meares, Jonathan Pfaff, Stephen Rushin, and William Stuntz. We will also read some primary materials and research on the DOJ’s investigation of Ferguson, stop and frisk policies, and structural reform litigation.

Sequence and Prerequisites: None

Evaluation: Students will be required to write short reaction papers for the weekly readings, due before class and published on the course website for fellow students to read. Grading will depend heavily on active participation in discussion, in addition to the reaction papers plus a short final paper.

Transitional justice refers to the process of responding to wrongdoing in the context of a transition away from extended periods of conflict and/or repression. The wrongs of interest constitute mass human rights violations and often implicate state officials. In this course, we survey a range of processes used to respond to such wrongdoing, including amnesty, criminal punishment, truth commissions, reparations, and official apologies. The central question the course takes up is: are (all/some/none) of such varied processes just responses to wrongdoing? To answer this question, we consider the point(s) or purpose(s) of each type of response. Are responses oriented towards fulfilling claims of victims or demands on perpetrators? Forward-looking goals and objectives? Both? We also consider their effectiveness: To what extent, and under what conditions, does a given legal response facilitate its stated purposes and goals? Our discussions draw on a range of cases, including Colombia, South Africa, and the United States. This is an upper-level-writing eligible course.

Prerequisite: There are no prerequisites for this course.

Evaluation: Contributions to class discussion and paper.

This seminar will examine the impact of violence on children’s lives.  It will focus not only on children as direct victims of violence (such as child physical abuse) but also as consumers of violence (in the form of video games, rap and hip-hop music, movies and television) and perpetrators of violence.  It will explore issues in culture affecting the well-being of children, including handgun violence, bullying, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, the impact of media on children’s aggression, and risk factors for children becoming violent predators.

Prerequisites: None.  

Evaluation:  90% of the grade in this course will come from a three-hour final exam and 10% from class participation.

This course, taught by Professors Lawless and Robbennolt, is designed to introduce students to one of the fastest growing areas of legal scholarship and practice—the use of empirical techniques. The emphasis in the course will be on equipping practitioners to be sophisticated and critical consumers of empirical material that may be used in legal cases, in the formation of legislation, and in public policy debates. The course will introduce students to the process of empirical research from start to finish, including how to design a project; how to conduct surveys, design experiments, and work with archival data; how to comply with ethical rules, sample appropriately, and code data; how to conduct a broad range of statistical analyses; and how to communicate effectively about numbers, statistics, and scientific research.

Sequence and Prerequisites: None

Evaluation: Students will fulfill the course requirements by designing an empirical research project and collecting relevant data in teams, writing an individual paper, presenting the research to the class, participating in class discussions, and completing homework exercises. Students will be taught to use statistical software, which will be available for purchase at a heavily discounted price from the UI Webstore. The course assumes no prior familiarity with statistics or empirical techniques.

“Jurisprudence” is a word with many meanings. As used in this course, “jurisprudence” refers to the philosophical study of the nature of law—the study of the sort of thing that law is and how it operates, regardless of jurisdiction or time period. Jurisprudence aims, among other things, to understand what law is, how law relates to morality or politics, the extent to which law is determinate or objective, how different sources of law—customs, precedents, statutes, etc.—make law, and how law enters into legal reasoning and the adjudication of legal disputes. Students in this course gain an appreciation for enduring puzzles about law that have perplexed legal thinkers for centuries and analyze various solutions to those puzzles. Readings include works by Thomas Aquinas, John Austin, H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, and other writers. No prior experience with philosophy is required.