Sexual Harassment Law (B. Bry*nt)

This course covers the historical development of sexual harassment law, current case law in employment and educational settings, comparative law, and the extent to which the current law and its application contribute to sex equality. Readings and classroom discussion include consideration of the social, racial, and economic factors that create and define sexual harassment, as well as how to evaluate and mediate sexual harassment cases.

Sex-based Discrimination (H. H*ll K*y)

The course examines the validity of distinctions based on sex in U.S. law, in light of their history, underlying policies, and social context. The following areas are covered: constitutional law, family law, employment law (primarily Title VII, the Equal Pay Act and related measures), education law (including Title IX), and criminal law.

Domestic Violence Practicum (N. Lem*n)

This clinical consists of 11-19 hours per week in a domestic violence legal setting and 1 hour per week in a seminar class with the other students. Enrollment in the clinic will include 5 or more students. Interns will keep logs of work done and any questions, concerns, or reactions, reflecting on what they are learning.

There are several different domestic violence legal agencies in the greater Bay Area where interns may work. Some interns will be certified so that they can represent clients at restraining order hearings, having interviewed the clients and drafted the restraining orders. Since the time between the interview and the hearing is usually only three weeks, it is possible for students to go through this entire process with many clients in a 14-week semester. The issues involved in restraining orders can be complex, involving restitution, payment of debts or child support, custody and visitation, and property control, in addition to the standard no-contact and stay-away orders. There may also be overlapping actions involving the same parties in the juvenile or criminal courts or other family law actions. Of course, other legal issues also arise in the course of the interview, typically in the areas of immigration, housing, welfare, and consumer rights. The students also may use counseling skills, as their clients are in crisis.

Placements also include the Domestic Violence Units of several different District Attorney’s Offices, working with the Public Policy and Research Committee of the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence on pending state bills and other domestic violence issues as well as writing amicus briefs, the Domestic Violence Project of the Employment Law Center at the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco, Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach (family law, immigration, and other types of cases), and Free Battered Women/The Habeas Project, which works to help incarcerated battered women get out of prison.

The classroom component will be a discussion of how the internship is going generally, with the focus on ethics, the lawyering process, case discussion, and any specific legal questions that arise. There will be some reading assigned, covering specifics of California domestic violence law and the lawyering process.

Students are encouraged to enroll in TeleBEARS Phase I so that placements may be arranged, and are urged to contact the instructor before enrollment begins. If the clinic is over enrolled, selection will be made by the instructor. This clinical has been offered at Boalt since 1989, shortly after Lecturer Nancy Lemon started an annual seminar in Domestic Violence Law.

Law and Poverty (J. Selb*n)

This course will provide an introduction to the relationship between law and contemporary poverty in the United States. We will explore the relevance of theory, doctrine and public policy to the persistent and damaging consequences of economic inequality – in income, assets, and access to affordable housing and health care – for tens of millions of U.S. residents. We will consider and scrutinize anti-poverty government programs (including legal services), market-based approaches and international perspectives. Course materials will be drawn from legal, social science and popular sources, and students will have an opportunity to apply their learning to problems facing low-income communities.

Restorative Justice (An. Harr*s, M. Frampt*n)

In this seminar we will explore both the theory and the practice of restorative justice, an alternative approach to the retributive justice model of our present criminal law system, and will engage in field work in the Alameda County courts and at the Oakland Tribune.

By focusing on a healing and restorative approach to crime that includes community involvement, offender accountability, and victim participation, this new paradigm provides a different lens through which to view the criminal justice system. Because its goal is restoration, the restorative justice model emphasizes alternatives to incarceration and fosters re-integration of the offender into society. The course will discuss the philosophy and history of restorative justice, the use of restorative justice models in other countries and cultures, the application of restorative justice principles to both juvenile and adult offenders in the United States, the use of restorative justice techniques in educational and domestic settings when violence occurs, and reparations movements in South Africa and the United States.

Students will have several opportunities for field work as well. They may choose to work with faculty and students at the Graduate School of Journalism on a new media violence reporting project at the Oakland Tribune that will fundamentally change the way in which crime is reported. They may elect to work directly with Alameda County judges to apply restorative justice principles to actual cases. Alternatively, they can work on restorative justice case studies of their own choosing with the approval of the instructor.

Mental Health Law, Advocacy & Policy (S. Ros*nbaum)

Students will explore the inter-relationships between law and mental disabilities through materials drawn from legal cases, statutes and policy writings. Mental health law is an emerging field that has sprung from the work of legislatures and the highest and lowest courts in the land, reflecting a variety of social aims related to persons with mental disabilities. These include treatment, habilitation, privacy, and the protection of civil liberties. In the minority of cases where mental disability and violence are connected, mental health law has also attempted to predict and prevent harm, consistent with the often-conflicting goals of the therapeutic community and the traditional criminal justice system.

This course will survey such issues as voluntary and involuntary commitment; mental health in the juvenile justice, schools and family law context; rights of institutionalized persons; right to treatment and right to refuse treatment; federal and state anti-discrimination statutes and entitlements; criminal prosecution, defenses and sentencing; and practicing therapeutic jurisprudence.

Immigration Law and Policy (M. Ech*veste)

This course will review the development of immigration policy with a special emphasis on developments post-1980 to the present. Substantive areas of focus will be changes in family and employment-based programs including regulatory, administrative and implementation issues. Significant attention will be given to the political, economic and social context surrounding important policy debates, including a close examination of the policy-making process, both legislatively and administratively.

Constitutional & Civil Rights of Immigrants (L. Guttent*g)

This course focuses on current issues related to immigrants’ constitutional and civil rights. This is not a survey course. We will do brief overview of basic immigration law concepts and then focus on a series of significant current issues such as constitutional limits on detention of non-citizens; the right to judicial review; post-9/11 and national security issues affecting non-citizens; workplace rights of immigrant workers; prohibitions on “alienage” discrimination; and the intersection of immigration and criminal law. The precise content of the class is subject to current events and student interest. The course will include legal doctrine, litigation strategy and policy considerations. When possible, guest lecturers involved in particular issues will be invited to share their perspectives with the class. A prior course in immigration law is not required. Enrollment is limited, participation in class is expected and a final exam will be given.

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.

Animal Law (B. Wagm*n)

This course presents a survey of the historical and current status of this rapidly developing specialty. In brief, animal law encompasses all areas of the law in which the nature - legal, social or biological - of nonhuman animals is an important factor. It is an objective and logical specialization of a challenging area - one with a growing number of cases and laws, increasing public practical interest, and significantly different historical, legal and philosophical foundations than most other courses.

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.

Sexual Rights: Perspectives from International and Comparative Law (A. Mill*r)

This seminar explores the legal aspects of sexual rights claims in contemporary international, regional and selected national fora. The term ‘sexual rights’ has been increasingly used in national and international settings to encompass an expanding universe of claims relating to sexuality; these include freedom and equality of sexual orientations and behaviors, freedom from sexual violence, conditions for sexual health, rights to sexual expression and association, rights to marry and form families, as well as rights to sexual relationships without marriage, and freedom to determine the relation between sexuality and reproduction. These claims are grounded in legal guarantees which are found in many different legal instruments, such as those relating to privacy, health, non-discrimination, information, expression, association, and freedom from torture and arbitrary detention. Judicial, activist and scholarly arguments for sexual rights (particularly those outside the US) often borrow heavily across borders, invoking international, regional and comparative standards. The status of sexual rights claims varies widely in national and regional courts, however, and doctrinal approaches are often inconsistent or inapplicable across claimants. Complications in building national and trans-national coherence stem from cross and intra-cultural differences of gender, racial and age-based social organization and norms, as well as the diversity national legal doctrines and advocates’ interests.

Seminar materials include national case law, regional cases and communications from the EU, ECHR/Council of Europe, IACHR/Organization of American States and the ACHPR/African Union as well as decisions, advisory statements and reports under the UN human rights treaty system. Case materials will be complemented by scholarly articles, primary materials from advocates working in many different cultural, legal and political settings, and reports from inter-governmental debates at regional and international levels. Key questions guiding the seminar include: How does sexual rights advocacy fit with other justice claims in debates about globalization and justice? What role does sexual rights claiming and attendant legal challenges play in national and global politics? What are the tensions between the push for transnational rights advocacy and local specificity? What impact does the turn to law have on these debates?