H. Ker*n

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The Legacy & Futures of Feminist (Legal) Theory (K. Abr*ms, H. Ker*n)

This course is organized as a demonstration of the vitality and importance of feminist work done across a variety of disciplines—much, though not all, of it related to law and public policy--that is intended to affect the welfare of women, through instrumental engagement with the quality and status of their lives. It aims to foster a generous, comparative, and critical appraisal of several areas in which feminist thought has made transformative contributions, and in which its trajectory has the potential to move us in exciting and potentially controversial directions. These areas include women’s citizenship (political, social, cultural), autonomy (as viewed through the lens of surrogacy) and efforts (in domestic and global settings) to secure economic justice. We will enter these debates over both conceptualization and implementation by reading what several salient contributors have to say. To endow each such subject with a reasonable period for reading, reflection, analysis, discussion and the potential for additional research, each topic within the seminar will be pursued within a unit of approximately three weeks.

The seminar will be offered jointly by Professor Jane Cohen for students of the U.T. School of Law and by Professor Kathy Abrams, for students at Boalt Hall School of Law. The seminar’s meetings will take place simultaneously on both campuses and will be telecast to the two classes simultaneously over a global satellite hook-up. Because Boalt Hall cannot accommodate a global satellite hook-up, Boalt students will meet each week in a classroom in Dwinelle Hall (on the main campus) which has this capacity.

This is a writing seminar. Students will write a paper or papers in lieu of taking an exam. Both professors will encourage participants to engage with members of the group who attend the “other” school, for purposes that not only include discussion in and outside of class, but research and writing, as well.

Challenges to Legal Rationality (K. Abr*ms, H. Ker*n)

This seminar will interrogate the assumption that legal decisionmaking – and indeed legal thought – is the domain of reason, understood as a series of logical operations undertaken from a posture of objective, dispassionate distance from the objects of one’s ratiocination. The seminar will begin with an examination of this premise, as it emerged in Langdellian efforts to assimilate law to the precepts of a science, as well as in the work of such contemporary legal thinkers as Owen Fiss, Richard Posner, and Guido Calabresi. We will then consider a series of challenges to this vision of legal thought, initiated first by the legal realists, and extended through the feminist and critical race challenges to legal objectivity, and the behaviorial challenge to law and economics.

The most important focus of the course, however, will be on a growing body of scholarship examining the role of emotion in law. We will take up early examples of this work, such as feminist analysis of the role of empathy in legal decisionmaking, and criminal legal scholars’ inquiry into negative emotions such as vengeance, indignation, and disgust. We will then focus on recent developments, such as scholarship highlighting the normative role of the law in supporting the emergence of positive emotions, such as hope and forgiveness. The seminar will also explore the issues raised for legal decisionmakers by the ability to produce visual images of cognitive and affective processes, through neuroscience technology such as the fMRI. We will conclude by asking how these varied conceptual challenges have changed, and might change, the dominant models of legal decisionmaking and legal thought.