Seminar Topics | DEV-College of Law | Illinois

798: Environmental Policy Seminar

Chris Davies — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 19:52:17 +0000

We are not living within our environmental means. We are depleting groundwater supplies, degrading agricultural soils, overfishing the oceans, cutting forests faster than they can re-grow, and filling in coastal and wetland areas in ways that exacerbate the devastating effects of floods and hurricanes. Our continued dependence on fossil fuels has caused an accumulation of greenhouse gases that threatens catastrophic changes in the Earth’s climate patterns. And our conversion of forests, grasslands, and wetlands to agriculture and urban development has resulted in a precipitous decline in biodiversity.

In this seminar we will pursue two distinct goals: first, to develop a better appreciation of the problems that beset our planet and the practices in which we each engage on a daily basis that cause those problems; and second, to ask deeper, more theoretical questions about why we continue, as individuals and as a society, to engage in those practices when evidence suggests that their short-term gains will not be worth their long-term costs. These two goals will cause us to pan back and forth between the empirics of environmental degradation and the theoretical and legal presuppositions that support and encourage our unsustainable practices.

This seminar is explicitly designed to complement the study of environmental law. Without understanding, for example, the value of biodiversity, the importance of preserving wilderness, the impact on animals of industrialized meat production, and the ways in which our consumptive practices continue to destabilize the climate, we will fail to craft and apply environmental law so as to serve its highest and best purposes. Only by understanding the sources of environmental degradation and by engaging in debate about the ethics of environmental management, can students (and ultimately law and policy makers) understand the role that law can best play in inducing sustainable practices and protecting valuable natural capital.

Sequence and Prerequisites: None

Evaluation: Students will be asked to do several in-class activities (cumulatively worth one-third of their grade) and two short papers (each worth one-third of their grade).

798: Women’s Rights and the Supreme Court

Chris Davies — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 19:48:52 +0000

The course will be conducted in a multi-media approach utilizing news clips, videos, podcasts, cases and articles. Students will examine how the Supreme Court has adjudicated the definition and development of the concept of women’s citizenship. Additionally, the Dobbs decision will be analyzed as a starting point to understand the Court’s revision of the definition of privacy as it has been enshrined as precedent in Roe for almost fifty years. The course will delve into the history of Supreme Court cases that have examined women’s rights addressing issues such as education, health, employment, intersectionality, race, religion, sexual orientation and culture. Throughout the course women lawyers who have been and are involved with the Supreme Court as clerks, nominees and candidates will be highlighted.

Sequence and Prerequisites: Constitutional Law is a prerequisite.

Evaluation: Two writing assignments. Students will select from several topics in consultation with the professor.

798: Seminar on Advanced Topics in Contract and Property Theory

Chris Davies — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 19:47:01 +0000

This is a seminar offered jointly by the University of Illinois and the University of Pennsylvania. It is co-taught by Leo Katz (Penn) and Michael Moore (Illinois). Students from both of these universities will be enrolled in the seminar. It is also possible that students/post-docs/faculty from other schools will also be auditing the seminar in whole or in part, as has been true of similar seminars in the past.

The subject matter of the seminar will be contemporary theories of two related areas of law, contracts and property. The seminar will together read and discuss a number of articles/book chapters/book excerpts by leading property or contract theorists in America, the UK, Germany, and elsewhere. Because the authors of these readings will often be invited in from remote locations to join the seminar discussion, and because this is a joint seminar involving students from different universities, each of the sessions will be conducted on Zoom. While there may be occasional in person sessions at either Penn or Illinois, there will otherwise be no in person classroom component.

Each student at the University of Illinois will be expected to team up (by Zoom) with at least one student from Penn to prepare questions and comments for the authors on one of the papers to be read and discussed in one of the fourteen sessions of the seminar. In addition, Illinois students will be expected to prepare a 5-10 page paper exploring in greater depth one of the topics discussed during the semester. This can be the topic on which the student also prepared questions for in-class discussion. There will no exam or other formal requirements other than regular attendance and participation.

Because there is no overlap between the content of this seminar and the content of the Seminar on Advanced Topics in Criminal Law taught by Michael Moore and Leo Katz academic year 2023-24, students who have taken the latter seminar may also enroll in the present seminar as well.

Sequence and Prerequisites: Contract Law and Property Law are prerequisites.

Evaluation: Each student at the University of Illinois will be expected to team up (by Zoom) with at least one student from Penn to prepare questions and comments for the authors on one of the papers to be read and discussed in one of the fourteen sessions of the seminar. In addition, Illinois students will be expected to prepare a 5-10 page paper exploring in greater depth one of the topics discussed during the semester. This can be the topic on which the student also prepared questions for in-class discussion. There will no exam or other formal requirements other than regular attendance and participation.

798: Seminar on Advanced Topics in Criminal Law Theory

Krista Gaedtke — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 20:18:04 +0000

This is a seminar offered jointly by the University of Illinois and the University of Pennsylvania. It will be co-taught by Leo Katz (Penn) and Michael Moore (Illinois). Students from both universities will be enrolled in the seminar. It is also expected that auditing students/post-docs/faculty from other schools will also be auditing the seminar in whole or in part.

The subject matter of the seminar will be contemporary criminal law theory. The seminar will together read and discuss 14 articles/book chapters/book excerpts by leading criminal law theorists in America, the UK, Germany, and elsewhere. Because the authors of these readings will often be invited in from remote locations to join the seminar discussion, and because this is a joint seminar involving students from at least three different universities, each of the sessions will be conducted on Zoom. There will be no in person classroom component.

Each student at the University of Illinois will be expected to team up (by Zoom) with at least one student from one or other of the other two universities to prepare questions and comments for the authors on one of the papers to be read and discussed in one of the fourteen sessions of the seminar. In addition, Illinois students will be expected to prepare a 5-10 page paper exploring in greater depth one of the topics discussed during the semester. There will no exam or other formal requirements other than regular attendance.

Sequence and Prerequisites: Criminal Law is a prerequisite.

Evaluation: Each student at the University of Illinois will be expected to team up (by Zoom) with at least one student from one or other of the other two universities to prepare questions and comments for the authors on one of the papers to be read and discussed in one of the fourteen sessions of the seminar. In addition, Illinois students will be expected to prepare a 5-10 page paper exploring in greater depth one of the topics discussed during the semester. There will no exam or other formal requirements other than regular attendance.

798: Law & Policy of Higher Education

Krista Gaedtke — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:31:42 +0000

Higher education composes a significant part of the fabric of American institutions. It has an enormous economic impact on society, both in terms of the production of knowledge and in terms of the development of skills for both employment and citizenship that profit American society immensely. Because institutions of higher education have specific missions, which distinguish them from commercial enterprises and even most other philanthropic and non-profit institutions, they are subject to a special and complex set of state and federal regulations. Institutions of higher education are also sites where students act as citizens, expressing their First Amendment right to speech and expression, in a complex setting that also serves academic missions.

So many of the conflicts that we see in society at large arise in some form on college campuses. A look at the legal and policy issues that arise in higher education will expose difficult questions related to employment and labor law, free speech and academic freedom, antidiscrimination and anti-harassment laws and policies, questions of sanctioning and due process, processes for internal institutional governance, and much more. This seminar will allow students to take a close look at how some of these legal and policy issues play out in the special context of higher education.

Institutions of higher education are also impactful. There are about 4,000 public and non-profit degree-granting institutions: doctoral and research universities, four-year colleges, two-year associate degree-granting institutions, and specialty four-year colleges – apart from the less traditional proprietary (for-profit) sector. These institutions enroll over 19.7 million students. In 2019, over $1.5 trillion in student loan debt was outstanding. The Chronicle of Higher Education has recently reported on the demand for lawyers knowledgeable about this area, and the Journal of College and University Law, sponsored by an association of college and university attorneys, is devoted to the special legal problems of these institution. This may well be a venue open to the publication of student work of sufficient quality.

Sequence and Prerequisites: None

Evaluation: This is a research seminar in which students will identify, research, and write about a salient legal problem particular to higher education. The paper will propose and defend a solution for it. The topic is of the student’s choice; a list of possible subjects will be circulated shortly after the middle of the semester. The paper should be between thirty and forty double spaced pages inclusive of footnotes – about the length of a solid law review student note.

The grade in the course will be based primarily on the quality of the paper, its thoroughness – this includes both non-legal as well as legal sources – analytical sophistication, and persuasiveness; and secondarily on the quality of the student’s presentation of and defense of the draft idea for the paper in class.

798: Racial Justice Practicum

Krista Gaedtke — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 14:10:39 +0000

This one-week intensive course will survey issues of race and inequality in several substantive legal areas: civil rights, employment discrimination, immigration, housing, healthcare, criminal justice and more. Each topic will be taught as a module by a guest lecturer who is an expert in the field. With a focus on both legal doctrine and policy, this course is designed to prepare students for the range of issues they will encounter in their summer placements and future careers as agents of socio-legal and racial justice.

Sequence and Prerequisites: None

Evaluation: Half of the final grade will be based on attendance and engaged participation. Half of the final grade will be based on written Racial Justice Journals.

798: Legal Cultures of Early America

Krista Gaedtke — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 19:47:54 +0000

This seminar will explore the social and intellectual history of American law in the colonial period. While we will pay some attention to the development of legal rules and institutions, we will concentrate on legal culture – on that configuration of values and habits of mind that shaped the operation of the legal system and informed how colonists understood the law’s purposes and meanings. In so doing, the course will stress the multiple roles of law: as a way of resolving disputes, distributing resources, channeling politics and social development, shaping personal identities, and creating authoritative categories of knowledge. The seminar is organized into five main parts. The first section examines the legal foundations and justifications of English colonization in North America. The second charts how colonization produced divergent regional legal cultures in the seventeenth century Chesapeake and in Puritan New England. The third looks at the regulation of slavery and of gender relations. The fourth returns to the problem of seventeenth-century legal culture, exploring not regional variation, but the important and distinctive characteristics of that legal culture evident throughout the American colonies, characteristics that lent it a flavor or style. Finally, the fifth section asks how and why the legal culture of the eighteenth century displaced that of the seventeenth. Stronger imperial oversight, the growing importance of trained lawyers, and the expansion of population and commerce are all considered as causes of this transformation. The seminar ends by looking briefly at the Spanish empire, asking how comparison to another New World imperial legal system helps us identify what is distinctive in British America.

Sequence and Prerequisites: None

Evaluation: Two, essay-based, closed book exams during the semester using the exam software.