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Seminar offerings change frequently in response to the research
activity of individual faculty members and student interest.
Prerequisites for individual seminars may be announced by the instructor
at the time of registration.
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Advanced Legal Research
The objective of this seminar is to give students an in-depth knowledge of general research tools and a good working knowledge of advanced tools available in specific subject areas. Both online and hard copy resources will be examined.
Prerequisites: Legal Analysis, Writing, and Research Skills I and II.
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Advanced Legal Writing Workshop
While writing practice is basic to writing improvement, another key way to strengthen writing skills involves reading the writing of others to offer a careful response to the text (as opposed to the more common way of reading for information). Moreover, by assessing and integrating peer feedback, the writer has the ability to stay in control of and be responsible for his or her own writing. Many composition programs at the undergraduate level have thus created some form of writing group in which students take the lead in providing directed feedback to other students. Using the undergraduate model, students in this course provide peer review to each other's work. The professor facilitates the feedback and provides additional peer review. Each section of this course is limited to eight to 16 students, at the professor's discretion, and meets one or more hours a week. There is writing product at the end of the course, but there is also a heavy emphasis on writing process. Most weeks the group responds to a piece written by a group member, but the group also reads examples of good writing and studies advanced writing techniques. Students should come to the course with writing projects already in mind. These can be completed writings that need substantial revising; writing projects that are in development but that need completion; or new research and writing projects, which may be suggested by the professor. All writing projects are subject to the professor's approval. Examples might include briefs, judicial opinions, or longer memos that were written for a course or for a pro bono or work experience (redacted to preserve client confidentiality) or a piece of academic or seminar-style writing.
Prerequisites: Legal Analysis, Writing, and Research I and II.
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Advanced Mediation Seminar
This seminar addresses a variety of current issues in the practice of mediation. Topics include ethnicity, gender, and power in mediation; the scope of confidentiality; the establishment and enforcement of ethical standards; mediation in the community; the role and practice of lawyers in mediation; the use of apology in mediation; the different settings in which mediation can take place; techniques of effective mediation; and mediation and justice. Additional topics are selected during the seminar. Students are expected to conduct independent research on selected topics, report to the seminar, and write a paper on their research. With permission of the instructor, students may conduct empirical research, or may participate in mediation and use their experience, together with other research, as a basis for analysis.
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Advanced Professionalism - Preparation for Practice
This course will assist third-year law students in building upon the knowledge and skills they've developed in law school and becoming the practice-ready attorneys that are so valued in the legal marketplace. Topics include the changing nature and evolving challenges of the legal profession, time and practice management, professional communications and relationships, ethics in action, and emerging legal technology. The course will examine these issues through the lens of different forms of practice--large and small law firms, solo practice, corporate counsel, government, educational and judicial careers, nonprofits, and nonlegal jobs utilizing law school experiences. Coursework will include readings and simulations as students consider the roles that lawyers play in solving clients' legal, ethical, and practical problems. Each student will write a paper and give a presentation to the group on a topic related to professionalism. Each student will design his or her own professionalism plan based on needs and interests and will be provided with mentoring and fieldwork opportunities based on that plan. Performance will be evaluated by written projects, oral presentations, and class participation.
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Art Law
This seminar will examine how the law shapes, contours, and constrains both the visual arts and artists. Emphasis will be given to issues such as copyright protection for artists; the moral and economic rights of artists; censorship and First Amendment rights of artists; artists' business relationships; public support for art and the display of art in public places; preservation of art and cultural property; stolen art and forgeries; the international movement of art; repatriation of cultural objects and the illicit international trade in art; and the role of museums in society. In addition to casebook readings and weekly discussions, the class will consider contemporary art controversies as a means of examining these broader issues. Students will participate in a field trip to a local museum or listen to a panel presentation by local gallery owners and museum curators. Requirements for all students include: class participation, an op-ed column on an assigned topic to be debated in class, and a research paper.
Class size will be limited to 20 students.
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Banking Law
This seminar will provide an overview of federal regulation of commercial banking institutions, including such topics as the definition of a bank, geographical product restrictions, mergers of banking institutions, and bank holding company regulations. The first half of the semester will consist of readings and lectures intended to introduce students to banking regulation. During the second half, students will be expected to prepare and give presentations on specific issues of current interest.
Prerequisite: Business Associations.
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Bioethics, Babies, and Babymaking
This seminar explores legal, moral, and ethical issues raised in the context of reproduction and reproductive technologies. Covers various theories underlying bioethical discourse, including feminist theories of bioethics, and selected laws and policies that govern the use of reproductive technologies and the regulation of pregnancy and parenting. Topics explored include assisted reproduction and in vitro fertilization, maternal-fetal conflicts, abortion, sex selection, genetic screening, embryo experimentation, stem cell research, and surrogate mothering.
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Business Planning
The seminar will focus on common planning issues facing attorneys representing a private business, large or small, during the various stages of the life of a business, from start-up through stages of growth to the sale or other disposition of the business. The seminar will also address deadlock among owners of a business and succession planning. To assist in the discussion of various issues, each class will center upon a particular set of facts, many of which are based on the actual experiences of the professors or guest speakers. The seminar will touch upon the wide variety of issues confronting counsel for private businesses, including tax, employment, corporation and limited liability company issues. For example, the seminar will review the various factors that affect the decision to organize a new business as a corporation or limited liability company, such as the contributions to the business of the various parties, the nature of the business, the anticipated path to growth of the business and the personal interests of the owners, and the tax and business consequences of this choice of entity.
Prerequisite: Business Associations. While specific tax issues will be addressed, a tax course is not a prerequisite. No business experience is necessary.
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Child Migration and U.S. Immigration Policy
This timely course will examine the factors leading to child migration, with a focus on the recent surge in Central American children coming to the U.S. border alone. In a weekly two-hour seminar, this course will focus on five main areas: (1) U.S. immigration policy toward children, including substantive law and procedure; (2) current push and pull factors leading to child migration from Central America; (3) the intersection between immigration law and state courts; (4) best practices in working with children in crisis across cultures; and (5) the challenges of reintegration after deportation. The course will be co-taught by professors from Rutgers-Camden and Rutgers-Newark and will be available to students in both locations. Some of the classes also will be led by guest speakers from other disciplines, including a child psychologist, an expert on gang prevention, and a professor of Latin American studies. There will be no final exam, but students will be required to complete a research paper, which can satisfy the writing requirement. Three-credit offering includes seminar and trip to Guatemala.
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Child Welfare System
This seminar will focus on the doctrinal and theoretical issues involved in the child welfare system, as well as some of the issues that occur in practice. Students will study state and federal statutes and case law, as well as various law review articles to gain a comprehensive understanding of how our child welfare system functions to protect abused and neglected children, how the courts operate alongside and in conjunction with this system, and whether all of this state intervention is always in the best interest of the children. As such, there will be classes on the concept of parens patriae and what it means in theory and in practice, how child abuse and neglect are defined, when parental rights should be terminated, what are the rights and entitlements of older youth who are forced to turn 18 as a ward of the state, and whether it is always best for children to be adopted when they cannot return to their biological families, among other topics. In addition, to provide students with a sense of what it is like to be an attorney representing a child, parent, or the state in a child protection matter, we will discuss the roles of each of these lawyers, as well as some of the complicated ethical dilemmas that inevitably arise. Finally, toward the end of the semester, the class will host a panel of attorneys practicing in this area to share some of their insights and experiences.
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Children and the Law Seminar
This seminar, which focuses on material generally not covered in Family Law, will examine the constitutional and public framework for allocating power and responsibility among children, the family, and the state. Recognizing that parents generally have power to make a wide range of decisions about their children's lives, this seminar will examine such questions as: When is it appropriate for the state to limit parental power? Under what circumstances should the law give children power to decide certain matters for themselves, and when should children be held responsible for their own actions? What responsibility does and should the state have to provide for children's needs? The class will explore selected legal topics relevant to these themes, including medical and psychiatric treatment, educational rights, child abuse and neglect, and foster care and adoption. It will also consider the changing nature of childhood and emphasize the sociological and psychological issues raised by the current legal structure. Each student in the seminar will have the opportunity to choose a topic for a class presentation and paper. Recent presentations have included topics such as intersexed children, cyberbullying, anacephalic newborns, undocumented children, the charter school controversy, and international adoption.
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Citizanship and the Constitution
The course examines constitutional questions regarding the acquisition and loss of citizenship status, and the rights associated with such status. The course focuses principally on the institution of citizenship in the United States, but it will also consider citizenship questions comparatively and in international law. Through readings in law and legal theory, the course will cover: birthright citizenship, citizenship by descent, naturalization, denaturalization, expatriation, plural citizenship, nationality and citizenship in U.S. territories, and the relationship of various rights and benefits (including voting and gun possession) to citizenship status. Self-scheduled take-home exam. One writing credit.
Prerequisite: Constitutional Law.
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Choice of Law
Choice of Law is a significant topic in Conflict of Laws, which is one of the subjects tested on the New York Bar Exam. (The other Conflict of Laws topics are Personal Jurisdiction and Recognition of Judgments, which are covered in Civil Procedure.)
Choice of law problems arise when the parties and events involved in a case have connections with two or more jurisdictions whose laws would determine the outcome of the case differently. The court hearing the case must choose which jurisdiction's law to apply. When the jurisdictions are states of the United States, no single choice of law rule or approach exists for the forum state to use in making its choice. This course explains the various rules or approaches state courts use to resolve choice of law problems. One segment of the course traces the development of New York's approach to choice of law.
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Cognitive Psychology for Lawyers
The last 30 years have seen a veritable explosion of new knowledge and new concepts of how people perceive, think, and decide. These stress that most thinking and deciding is done without conscious thought or rational deliberation. Named in various fields as "the new unconscious," "System 1 and System 2 Thinking," and "behavioral economics" these have revolutionized the various academic domains where they have appeared. Will they do the same for law? They shed new light on a broad range of legal activities and doctrine--how lawyers persuade judges and juries, how lawyers negotiate, how mediators work, the accuracy of witness memory and perception, the nature of biases, the limits of free will and legal responsibility, and so on. The seminar will explore these topics through books written for the general public by important researchers in the field. The second half of the seminar will be devoted to student reports on approved research projects. Prior familiarity with academic psychology is not required. In fact, a seminar composed of students with a variety of backgrounds and experiences would be desirable. Grading will be on the basis of a paper and class participation.
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Comparative Corporate Governance
This seminar will investigate and compare standards of performance applied to corporations, and to their governing bodies and executives. The point of departure will be the U.S. system. We will use the UK and France to represent, respectively, the Anglo-Saxon and Continental perspectives, without forgetting the impact of the European Union. To gain a fuller understanding, we will also explore the social, historical, and cultural contexts that may help explain differences and similarities. Depending on the particular experience and language skills of seminar participants, we will add other national perspectives as well.
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Comparative Labor and Employment Law
This seminar will explore the variety of labor and employment law regimes found in the world today. The goal of this inquiry will be to identify best practices either doctrinal or procedural, and consider whether and how they might be incorporated into the U.S. labor and employment law regime. Following a brief overview of the distinguishing features of U.S. labor and employment law, we will spend approximately two-thirds of the course studying the similar and contrasting features of a cross section of other countries, including South Africa, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, and Japan. During the rest of the semester each member of the seminar will be afforded the opportunity to present their own research either comparing the approaches of other countries to a particular issue or providing an overview of the labor and employment law regime in a country we have not studied during the first part of the semester. Grading will be based on a research paper and participation in seminar discussions during class and/or on the seminar discussion board.
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Computer Crimes
This course explores the growing field of cybercrime and the Fourth Amendment issues arising in investigations involving computers, digital media, and digital communications. Discussion will include both legal and policy issues now encountered by judges, legislators, prosecutors, and defense counsel as they react to the ever-growing and changing computer-related crime. We will consider the interplay between traditional laws, investigations, and prosecutions, on the one hand, and cyberspace, on the other. Topics include: computer crimes, such as computer hacking, logic bombs, viruses, worms, cyberterrorism, Trojan horses, and identity theft; criminal procedure, such as electronic surveillance and the Fourth Amendment in cyberspace; and policy, including defining what cyber conduct should be criminalized, identifying appropriate resolutions, and discussing civil liberties online.
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Confinement, Reentry, and Policy
Every day in this country, nearly 1,800 people are released from prisons, jails, and detention facilities--a number likely to rise in the ensuing months with the implementation in California of the population reduction order required by the U.S. Supreme Court in this year's Coleman/Plata decision, and preemptive measures taken elsewhere. In those states with the highest rates of confinement, the communities to which offenders will return are disproportionately poor and racially segregated. Legal, physical, psychological, financial, and social barriers await their return; and, not surprisingly, more than two-thirds of them will reoffend within three years of release. In many circles, there is general agreement that the system, with its chronic recidivism and ballooning cost, is "broken" and in critical need of reform. The question that remains hotly debated, and that to which we repeatedly will return over the course of the semester, is "How?"
As its title suggests, this interdisciplinary seminar examines the roots of the challenges of reentry in the legal history of mass incarceration, while at the same time tracing the contours of policy skirmishes occurring in local, state, and federal arenas regarding best practices for addressing this phenomenon. For our purposes, this requires a study of how law--constitutional, statutory, and judicially-rendered at the local, state, and federal levels--directly impacts communities, public safety, justice, and human development, and also how social categorizations of persons by gender, race, class, and sexuality reflect and refract certain assumptions about deviance and criminality. While the course takes a national arc, our focus will remain local, with appropriate consideration given to New Jersey and New York (in our assigned readings and featured guest speakers).
In addition to weekly written responses to assigned readings, a final research paper (15-plus pages, in the style of a law review/scholarly article) is required (in lieu of an exam).
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Corporate Social Responsibility
This seminar will explore the role and purpose of the American business corporation in society. In the process, it will consider a range of scholarship from the school of progressive corporate law. Broadly speaking, this scholarship seeks to integrate commitments to social justice into the law that governs U.S. corporations and to challenge concepts that privilege wealth maximization for shareholders over protections for the environment, for human rights, and for the interests of corporate stakeholders such as workers, consumers, and local communities. The seminar will also explore case studies of the global corporate social responsibility movement and investigate new ways to harness the power of corporations to create a more socially just and equitable society.
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Cuba Legal Field Study
Cuba, an island nation neighbor of the United States, just 90 miles off the Florida coast, has a long and complex relationship with the United States. This relationship has been openly hostile since the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. That the proximity of Cuba affects the national security of the United States is undisputed. Likewise, the 11 million inhabitants of the island and the more than 1.3 million Cubans living in the United States have had a dramatic effect on the culture and politics of the United States. In 1960 the United States imposed an embargo against Cuba. This embargo, which the Cuban government insisted was a blockade, severely restricts commercial, economic, and financial contact, by persons and entities subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with Cuba. After 50 years of imposing an embargo which sought to topple the regime, in December 2014 President Obama ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations and the opening of an embassy in Havana.
This 2-credit seminar will explore the historical development of Cuba's legal system. Students will be exposed to the civil law, which is the basis of Cuba's present legal system. We will examine the evolution of the Cuban Constitution and its role in addressing changes in Cuban society.
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Cultural Heritage Law Seminar
This seminar provides an introduction to the law pertaining to cultural heritage such as ancient artifacts, historical relics, and fine art. Topics covered include illicit antiquities trade, cultural heritage protection in times of armed conflict, repatriation of colonially acquired artifacts, repatriation of Nazi looted objects, repatriation of Native American remains under NAGPRA, bilateral agreements between source and market nations, and the role that museums and auction houses play in the illicit antiquities trade. Each student will submit a scholarly paper on a pertinent topic of their choice. One field trip to a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site will be included.
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Current Issues in Constitutional Law
Students enrolling in this seminar are required to brief and argue selected cases from the current docket of the United States Supreme Court.
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Developing a Solo or Small Firm Practice
This class focuses on the issues surrounding the development of a solo or small firm practice, spanning legal, business, and ethical concerns, in the context of how to structure a practice, how to build a client base, how to develop a sustainable practice area, and how to manage the practice once up and running. The course is designed particularly for those students who are considering this option, so that the practice they develop can survive and thrive.
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Diversity and the Law
This seminar will explore the intersections of law with diversity, race, equal protection, civil rights, and pluralism/multiculturalism. Through an examination of judicial opinions, legislation, legal scholarship, social science research, and case studies, students will evaluate and critique diversity as an established and evolving legal, social, and political construct in our "post-racial" American democracy.
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Education Law
This seminar deals with the basic legal structure of the public education system and explores a range of current legal and educational policy issues confronting the public schools. These include: various aspects of equal educational opportunity such as school finance reform, and racial and socioeconomic diversity; state-local district relations and responsibility for the quality of education provided; student rights; and pupil classification and other means to meet special pupil needs. To a substantial degree, the seminar uses pending cases and legislative developments to illuminate the issues.
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Elder Law
The legal community now recognizes that elder law, while not yet fully delineated, can be a self-contained area of practice in which attorneys may have to deal with their clients holistically. In addition, firms and solo practitioners recognize they can no longer conduct "business as usual" with their older clients without regard to the complex of federal and state statutory and administrative law and public and private institutions to which older Americans are beholden for their daily existence. This seminar explores the resources, issues, and substantive law in representation of older Americans in their quest for economic and personal independence. Topics include income maintenance through devices in the public and private sector; the maintenance of autonomy in the face of increasing vulnerability through use of surrogate decision-making devices; problems of health care and housing; and concerns for dying.
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Entertainment Law Drafting
Students will learn key strategies for working with clients on entertainment matters and how to successfully structure and execute deals in the entertainment industry. Core fundamental legal elements of representing clients in film/television and the music industry will include an overview of regulations, legislation (including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), key case law, such as the Kids on the Block case, strategies for counseling clients, protecting a client during negotiations, drafting and negotiating contracts, dealing with risk, avoiding common mistakes, adding value, and developing a positive client-attorney relationship. Topics covered will also include analyzing the roles of key players, such as lawyers, managers, and agents; evaluating key documents; and developing strategies for counseling clients, settling disputes, and avoiding future legal issues. Students will engage in lively debate regarding industry and legal responses to digital audio, video, and interactive media; the George Michael and TLC efforts to extricate themselves from contracts; and review the ongoing debate over television violence (the "Devil Movie Made Me Do It" claims of film and television industry responsibility for tortious and violent behavior) and V-chip.
A large portion of the class will focus on drafting business agreements in connection with film/television and the music industry. As a class, we will choose a popular music artist, and we will then act as legal counsel to that artist in creating, drafting, negotiating, etc., all documents and registrations necessary to protect the artist and his or her property. Weekly assignments will follow the career of the artist from initial songwriting/creation protection (including composer and producer agreements, creation and filings for publishing companies, copyrights and protecting compositions) to personal management agreements, performance and synchronization agreements, recording contracts, releases (including depiction and copyright releases) through potential offers to appear on television (actor employment agreements), etc., concert performances to recording deals to movie/film/television offers.
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Financial Institutions
This seminar will examine current issues affecting regulations of different institutions providing financial services, specifically focusing on the impact of deregulation on the financial services industry, the existing regulatory structure (administered by the SEC, federal and state bank regulators, stock exchanges, and securities organizations), and recent proposals for functional regulations of financial products.
Prerequisite: Business Associations.
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Freedom of Expression: Comparative Perspectives
This course will cover the basic theories and structure of First Amendment free speech jurisprudence. It will examine how First Amendment law has evolved over the past century to address such issues as incitement, national security, hate speech, campaign speech, the role of the press, defamation, privacy, compelled speech, commercial speech, intellectual property, and government speech. The course will focus on the ways in which American free speech law balances freedom of expression with other values such as equality, dignity, security, consumer protection, and privacy. It will then (in approximately the last quarter of the course) turn to select case studies of how other national (Canada and UK) and super-national (EU) regimes strike very different balances. The course may feature participation where appropriate by a practicing lawyer on select issues.
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Gender, Gender Identity, Sexuality, and the Law
This seminar will explore the intersections of law, gender, gender identity, and sexuality through the frameworks of constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, family law, and legal theory. Topics include employment discrimination, intimate relationships, family, and violence. The seminar will explore throughout these topics legal and social constructions of gender (including gender identity) and sexuality, privacy, autonomy, and the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity.
Course not open to students who have taken either Sex Discrimination Seminar or Gender and the Law Seminar.
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Global Labor Rights
There are many current efforts to use law to raise labor standards in the developing world, but little systematic understanding of when such regulation arises and what, if anything, it accomplishes. We will examine standards of the International Labor Organization; labor rights applied in U.S. courts (U.S. statutes with extraterritorial application; tort and human rights suits against U.S. and foreign employers); labor standards in trade law; labor standards in bilateral trade agreements such as the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation; corporate codes; transnational collective bargaining and framework agreements; consumer boycotts and their settlement. We will then examine how these diverse actors and doctrines work together, or fail to, when addressing child labor, unsafe workplaces, sexual trafficking and other forced or slave labor, and migrant labor. Students will write a research paper examining one such campaign or litigation.
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Higher Education Law
This course will provide students with a solid introduction and exposure to a vast range of legal issues, theories, policies, and considerations affecting colleges and university, from the perspective of in-house counsel. Students will identify, discuss, and analyze legal trends and developments in higher education. Students will further develop their legal advocacy skills through factual problem analysis, and related classroom discussions and presentations of "ripped from the headlines" issues. Students will have an opportunity to produce a substantive paper with feedback provided by the instructor. Topics include the public/private dichotomy; right to privacy; social media; sexual harassment and assault; tenure; faculty and staff contracts; student discipline and dismissal; fraternities and sororities; athletics; and student debt.
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History of American Corporate Governance Seminar
This seminar covers the history of corporate governance and regulation from the framing of the Constitution to the adoption of the New Deal era securities acts. Topics may include theories of the corporate form, the development of general incorporation statutes, innovations in corporate organization, political opposition to corporations, corporate corruption and scandals, women and corporations, the creation of a managerial class, the rise of corporate lawyering, the landmark role of New Jersey in state corporate regulation, and the origins of federal regulation of public companies.
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Intellectual Property: Current Issues
This seminar will explore hot topics in IP today. Emphasizing copyright and patent law, the course will cover patent trolls, the smartphone patent wars, drug patent settlements, gene patents, the music industry, privacy, technology, property, trade agreements, and other issues.
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Islam, Secularism, and Human Rights
This seminar critically examines the theory and practice of Islamic and
secular governance, with special attention devoted to the rights of
women and religious minorities. The seminar will draw on international
human rights law, comparative constitutional law, and political
philosophy to explore the relationship between religion, the state, and
the individual. The seminar will relate the laws of selected
countries--including the United States, France, Turkey, India, Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia, and Iran--to broader intellectual and political
movements, including liberalism, republicanism, feminism,
multiculturalism, modernism, and fundamentalism.
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Juvenile Justice
This seminar will examine the state's treatment of children and adolescents accused of unlawful behavior. Students will study the creation and evolution of the juvenile justice system in historical context. That exploration begins by assessing the legal, social, and historical underpinnings of the juvenile justice system at its creation in 1899, as well as the turn-of-the-century assumptions about childhood, punishment, and the judiciary's parens patriae responsibilities. Ultimately the historical exploration focuses on the late 20th-century ideological and institutional evolution of the juvenile court. Students will consider the United States Supreme Court's recognition of certain due process rights for juveniles, its subsequent rejection of others, and the ongoing effort to reconcile the often competing goals of rehabilitation, punishment, and procedural protection. The course would then turn to current issues and challenges facing the juvenile justice system, including: 1) the criminalization of youthful offending (e.g., waiver and transfer, erosion of confidentiality, and sentencing); 2) the unique obligations of juvenile defense counsel; 3) institutional reform litigation; 4) disproportionate representation of minority youth in the juvenile justice system; and 5) efforts to integrate social sciences and medical adolescent development research with juvenile justice policy and practice. The course will include student participation in one or two simulation exercises (for example, a juvenile court detention hearing).
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Law Against Torture
Torture is at the heart of human rights law and activism. This interdisciplinary course will explore selected topics (legal, moral, historical, psychological, inter alia) arising from the practice of torture and efforts to define and prohibit it. United States, international, and some comparative law will be considered. Topics will include the Convention Against Torture; the Geneva Conventions; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; rendition; nonrefoulement; accountability; rape as torture; intelligence gathering and national security; targeted killings, and other unintended consequences; the historical contexts of both torture and the campaigns to prohibit it.
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Law and Religion
This course focuses on historical and current interpretations of the free exercise and establishment clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It begins with a focus on the meaning of free exercise and no establishment of religion in the early period of the Republic. With this background in view, the course will trace the development of free exercise and establishment clause jurisprudence, including relevant statutes, up to the present period. Topics will include, among others, religious exemptions from general laws, Sabbath day observance, proselytism, the role of religion in public education, religious displays in public life, and the extent to which religious institutions may regulate employment according to their religious beliefs.
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Litigation, Insurance, Torts
Selected topics in the litigation process, insurance law and practice, and tort law and the civil justice system. A particular emphasis will be on empirical research and theoretical approaches to litigation, with special reference to tort and insurance issues. Topics will vary from year to year but may include settlement; characteristics of and influences on plaintiff and defendant personal injury practice; the role of insurance and insurance companies in the tort system and litigation process; and the landscape of disputes and dispute processing.
The course is directed at students with a strong interest in civil litigation, particularly in the areas listed.
Relevant experience or interest, such as participation in an intensive litigation course or work experience, is helpful.
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Police Misconduct Law and Policy
This seminar will address numerous legal and policy issues at the heart of modern controversies in American policing. In particular, we will study tools commonly used to combat alleged police misconduct, including class actions, criminal prosecutions, antidiscrimination legislation, and investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice. Case studies will include the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk program, the suspicionless surveillance of Muslim communities in New Jersey and New York, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the deaths of unarmed civilians in Ferguson and Baltimore.
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Public Education Law
This seminar deals with the basic legal structure of the public education system and explores a range of current legal and educational policy issues confronting the public schools. These include: various aspects of equal educational opportunity such as school finance reform and racial and socioeconomic diversity; state-local district relations and responsibility for the quality of education provided; student rights; and pupil classification and other means to meet special pupil needs. To a substantial degree, the seminar uses pending cases and legislative developments to illuminate the issues.
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Race, Gender, and Tort Law
This seminar explores how harms involving race and gender are treated under tort law. We will attempt to define the nature of race and gender-based injuries, and evaluate the adequacy of existing tort law to address them. Through an examination of specific topics, we will consider issues such as the effect of race and gender on the development of causes of action and standards of conduct, the relationship between tort law and civil rights remedies, and questions involving damages and nondiscrimination in jury selection. Problems of essentialism and the intersection of race and gender will be addressed.
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Role of the General Counsel
This seminar replicates the general counsel's office of a major corporation and acquaints students with a large transaction and its attendant legal and practical problems. It also replicates the day-to-day activities of such an office. The emphasis is on a transaction and other events which pose issues of corporate law and governance. Seminar members are expected to work individually and in teams, to present materials both orally and in writing, and to play active roles in the issues under consideration.
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Second Amendment Seminar
This seminar will examine the emerging treatment of the firearms freedom by the judiciary in light of District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago. Topics will include the text and history of the Second Amendment, and state constitutional and statutory provisions. The constitutional theories supporting the enforcement of the right to bear arms, including the incorporation doctrine and the privileges and immunities clause, will be discussed. The seminar will also examine any emerging doctrinal trends that determine whether future governmental regulation affecting this nascent individual constitutional right are permissible.
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Sex Discrimination Seminar
This seminar will explore the intersections of law, gender, and sexuality through the frameworks of constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, family law, and legal theory. Topics include employment discrimination, reproductive rights, intimate relationships, violence, and pornography. The seminar will explore throughout these topics legal and social constructions of gender and sexuality, privacy, autonomy, and the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity.
Course not open to students who have taken either Gender and the Law Seminar or Gender, Gender Identity, Sexuality, and the Law Seminar.
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Social Media and Terrorism
This course will examine the impact of international and U.S. law on the content of social media. The use of platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter by ISIS and like-minded groups has raised many challenging questions regarding the repercussions of extreme speech across borders. Among other factors, the proliferation of social media has exposed the limits of unilateral content legislation and put the struggle to accommodate competing interests of free speech, privacy, and security in stark relief. Further, the anonymity afforded by social media has made extreme speech and incitement of violence effortless and, in some cases, beyond the realms of traditional law. The aim of this course is to examine the need for a fresh approach and the potential role technology may play in curbing extreme speech.
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South African Constitutional Law
Introduces students to the Constitution of South Africa, which is one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. The classroom portion of the course will begin with an introduction to the history of South Africa as it relates to the development of the country's constitution. The rest of our class meetings prior to the trip will be devoted to a study of health, human rights, and the jurisprudence of the country's Constitutional Court with a focus on the role the court has played and is continuing to play in shaping the country's political, economic, and social development. During this portion of the course, members of the class will be required to prepare short papers addressing various issues that arise in the course of our studies. Satisfactory completion of these written assignments will be required to receive credit for the course. We will travel to Johannesburg and Cape Town where we will get to see how the promises of the South African Constitution are or are not being met.
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Special Education Law Seminar
The course will start with an historical examination of the public
education system's treatment of children with disabilities, and the
subsequent federal legislative response to the inadequate educational
opportunities afforded them (namely the Individuals with Disabilities
Educational Act [IDEA] and its predecessor Acts, Section 504 of the
Rehabilitation Act, and the Americans wth Disabilities Act [ADA]). We
then will cover each step of the special education process, including child find, evaluation, eligibility and classification, individualized
educational program (IEP) development, student discipline, procedural
safeguards, court proceedings, available remedies, and the meaning of
the statutory requirement that schools provide "a free and appropriate
public education in the least restrictive environment." At each stage,
we will examine the applicable statutory law and regulations, the
seminal cases governing the particular area, and the relevant policy
issues.
This course is open to all students, whether or not they are taking the Education and Health Law Clinic. All students who are taking the Education and Health Law Clinic for the first time must take this course simultaneously, if they have not taken the class previously.
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Sports Law Drafting and Negotiation
This course focuses on the drafting and negotiation of certain sports law transaction documents. Examples of documents to be discussed in the course are representation contracts (including merchandising/endorsement income, rights to publicity, conflicts of interest, and suitability, trial period, escape and morals clauses); suite license agreements; sponsorship agreements; naming rights agreements; sports team acquisition agreements; and media rights agreements. This course is intended to be hands-on with all students having the opportunity to experience being a "sports law attorney" at a law firm or corporate/sports team legal setting. There will be three independent writing assignments, which will require the students to draft transaction documents based on forms from sports transactions. Students will become familiar with sports negotiation terminology, how to prepare for and conduct negotiations, and understand what to do if a negotiation fails. The final assignment will be a group assignment consisting of negotiating and finalizing a sports transaction document. There will also be periodic negotiation sessions to foster establishing relationships of trust, identifying mutually agreeable and beneficial solutions to some of the intractable contract points, knowing when to make concessions, and negotiating for the long-term. Grading shall be based upon class participation (quality not quantity), attendance, written drafting assignments, and the final negotiation/drafting assignment.
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Transactional Drafting: Intellectual Property
This writing-intensive class will simulate the negotiation of an intellectual property licensing transaction, drafting a term sheet, and drafting a definitive licensing agreement. The class will meet for the first two-three weeks, during which we will discuss the applicable intellectual property law, as well as the law governing license contracts. Students will then be paired (as counsel for licensee and licensor) and each student will be given a set of instructions from their client. Students will first negotiate and draft a term sheet, and then draft a definitive license agreement. Students will submit drafts of the term sheet and the definitive license agreement and meet with the faculty instructor who will provide feedback on the drafts. Grades will be based on the final (nondraft) documents.
Prior coursework in intellectual property is not required, although it may be helpful.
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U.S. Legal Thought
This seminar provides an introduction to the most important approaches found in 20th-century legal scholarship, including legal realism, legal process, law and economics, law and society, and critical theorists. We will study the 20 classic articles found in The Canon of American Legal Thought (David Kennedy and William W. Fisher III eds., 2006, Princeton University Press), which range from Holmes to John Dewey to Lon Fuller to Ronald Coase to Duncan Kennedy to Catherine McKinnon. This collection was first created to help students from abroad to understand the contemporary United States legal system, and is equally illuminating for those who know more about our law than about the ideas scholars and practitioners deploy to analyze and change it. Our goal will be to understand what these scholars are saying and relate their thought to broader social concerns and developments.
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White-Collar Crime
This course considers the legal, moral, and policy considerations that underlie a number of key white-collar criminal offenses, including perjury; mail and securities fraud; false statements; obstruction of justice; bribery, extortion, and blackmail; tax evasion; regulatory offenses; money laundering; conspiracy; and RICO. Interwoven will be an ongoing treatment of various issues of corporate and organizational liability, individual liability in an organizational setting, federal jurisdiction over crime, the question of overcriminalization, sentencing, and the role of the white-collar prosecutor and defense attorney.
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Wrongful Convictions
This seminar is about the conviction and incarceration of the factually innocent in the American criminal justice system. We will examine how and why wrongful convictions occur, the sources of error (e.g., eyewitness misidentifications, false confessions, perjured testimony from jailhouse informants, police and prosecutorial misconduct, etc.), and what can be done to minimize future errors. A paper will be required.
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