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Academic Advising

The Office of Student Affairs through the Assistant Dean for Academic Advising provides academic advisement in the following areas:

  • Curriculum planning
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New & Notable Courses

Law of Slavery

This course introduces students to the common law of American slavery. It focuses on the daily disputes that juries and judges adjudicated to demonstrate how slavery saturated southern law, encompassing not only conflicts over freedom and race, but also inheritance, mortgages, marriage, torts, contracts, and property. In the process the course continually returns to what we expect from a rule of law while engaging some of the major debates that have dominated slavery studies over the last thirty years. These include the salience of race versus class in American slavery; its similarities and differences from other enslaving cultures; whether to characterize it as a totalitarian legal and political system; the extent to which those parts of the nation that preceded the South in abolishing slavery could be characterized as "free"; whether slavery was "efficient"; its impact on black culture, especially on the black family; slavery's gender and class effects; the possibility of love and erotic desire under slavery; questions of slave resistance; and, of course, the role of law in implementing, reinforcing, and sustaining slavery. Weekly readings include cases and treatise excerpts, as well as secondary scholarly sources.

Second Amendment: History, Theory, and Practices

The Supreme Court's decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago have ushered in a whole new era of Second Amendment theory, litigation, and politics. Current events keep issues of firearms, gun violence, gun safety, and self-defense constantly in the news. This seminar will explore the Second Amendment and the various state constitutional analogs historically, theoretically, and pragmatically. Students will be introduced to the historical and public policy materials surrounding the Second Amendment, the regulatory environment concerning firearms, and the political and legal issues pertaining to firearm rights-enforcement and policy design. Evaluation for the seminar will be based on eight short reaction papers and in-class participation.