Study

This course is intended as an introduction to experimental research, legal theory, and caselaw on jury decision making.  Although the topic overlaps considerably with areas of basic decision making--e.g., the heuristics and biases literature--the focus will be mostly on applied research looking at the decisions of real (or simulated) jurors.

This course critically assesses the field of human rights advocacy, its institutions, strategies, and key actors. It explores how domestic, regional, and global human rights agendas are set using international law frameworks; the ethical and accountability dilemmas that arise in human rights advocacy; and human rights advocacy concerning a range of actors, including governments, international institutions, and private actors. It addresses the role of human rights in social movements, including in addressing systemic racism, as well as the development of transnational human rights networks. It also considers issues such as how to resolve purported hierarchies and conflicts between internationally-guaranteed rights, efforts to decolonize the practice of human rights, and the ways in which populist and other forces also invoke human rights to further particular agendas. Drawing on case studies within the United States and abroad, it will examine core human rights advocacy tactics, such as fact-finding, litigation, standard-setting, indicators, and reporting, and consider the role of new technologies in human rights advocacy. In examining the global normative framework for human rights, this course focuses on how local, regional, and international struggles draw on, and adapt, the norms and tactics of human rights to achieve their objectives. Evaluation will be based on class participation and a final paper.

This class is a pre-requisite or corequisite for Law 437 International Human Rights Clinic.

Urban Legal History is a research seminar which will focus on the legal issues relating to Durham's political, social, and economic development. The class will involve intensive study of primary and secondary materials, and will require students to produce substantial (45 page) research papers.

Issues in the legal regulation of human sexuality and gender identity are contested to varying degrees worldwide. Taking a global, comparative, and interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of the legal regulation of human sexuality and gender identity, this course uses case-studies to examine the cultural and religious, as well as the political and jurisprudential foundations of court decisions, laws, and regulations.

“Access to justice” (sometimes denominated “A2J”) is a multidimensional concept that eludes easy definition. This course will use the term expansively, to capture the ways in which our civil legal system does or does not respond to the legal needs of ordinary people.
This course will examine the structural obstacles that impede access to civil justice as well as contemporary opportunities for reform. Access barriers can have a variety of sources. Barriers can be doctrinal (e.g., the civil right to counsel), practical (e.g., courts’ ability to accommodate non-English-speaking litigants), economic (e.g., the rise of binding arbitration), or political (e.g., limited funding for legal aid offices), and nearly all are multifactorial. Similarly, opportunities for improvement can be found in doctrine, institutional design, community engagement, and technology. Compared to a course on substantive law, our focus will be on the institutional, procedural, and practical dimensions of the access problem.

The course will be divided into roughly three components. In Part I, we will consider theories and doctrines of civil legal access. In Part II, we will consider institutional and procedural features that shape access to our civil legal system, as well as the roles of different actors and constituencies in the civil justice system, including: lawyers and the legal profession; self-represented litigants; community organizations; courts; and non-judicial government institutions. In Part III, we will consider a handful of “pressure points” in access to civil justices—that is, areas of the law where legal needs are especially significant, and where access is especially challenging. Among the areas will consider will be family law, housing law, consumer law and consumer bankruptcy, and immigration law. Solutions and opportunities for change will be discussed throughout all three parts of the course.

Students will be evaluated on the basis of class participation, four response papers and a research proposal.

This two-credit seminar will examine the extent to which the criminalization of abortion in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), together with 21st century surveillance, compromises or eliminates the physical, decisional, and informational privacy of women and people who can become pregnant.

We will review the history of the Supreme Court’s contraception and abortion cases and carefully read Dobbs. We will learn about the historical criminalization of abortion and pregnancy outcomes in the US and related surveillance. We will then examine current state laws criminalizing abortion, defining a fetus as a person, and creating civil liability schemes, and discuss how these laws affect privacy. We will learn about the laws that protect (and fail to protect) privacy in our modern information economy and consider the ways privacy law intersects with abortion law. In this context, we will consider both commercial surveillance and surveillance by law enforcement.  Other topics will include: the privacy implications of medication abortion and the current litigation that threatens its continued availability in the US; the extent to which providers, aiders and abettors, and women who self-manage abortion may be subject to prosecution in ban states; the increasing legal conflicts between shield states and ban states; the effects of criminalization on the privacy of the physician-patient relationship and the associated disincentives for seeking reproductive health care; the implications of laws purporting to control, limit or prohibit access to or dissemination of information about abortion in ban states; and attempts to affect or restrict individuals’ movement within and between states to obtain care.

Both privacy and abortion law are rapidly changing environments in the United States, and attention to current developments in both arenas will be part of the class. We will make every effort to address and incorporate developments as they occur. Assignments will include interactive online comments and responses about the readings, a research project and presentation on the developing law in a particular state, and a writing assignment. There is no final exam.

This course is not open to students who took Law 611.45 - Readings: Privacy in a Post-Dobbs World in Fall 2022.