Course Catalog

This course covers the basic institutions of civil litigation in an adversary jury trial system. It explores the different procedural devices that arise out of the relationships among the parties, the judge, and the jury. Many litigation topics are covered, including issues relating to pleadings, discovery, other pretrial procedures, joinder, preclusion, and jurisdiction.

• Type: First Year Required

This seminar will examine the ways in which transsubstantive procedural doctrines shape the enforcement and meaning of civil rights laws. Topics will include the Ashcroft v. Iqbal standard for granting a motion to dismiss; judicial applications of the summary judgment standard; obstacles to the certification of classes seeking injunctive or declaratory relief; the process for amending the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure; restrictions on the use of federal legal aid funds; and statutory fee shifting.

• Type: Seminar

Professor Chaney’s section: This course will explore the practical, conceptual and procedural mechanics of civil rights practice through mock litigation of one or more simulated case studies. Students will engage the stages of litigation, including claim and defense development, preparing and answering pleadings, crafting written discovery, conducting effective depositions, and presenting oral argument, while exploring the nuanced issues that arise in civil rights practice, including client management, dealing with client and personal trauma and triggers, establishing noneconomic harm, and collaborative practice.
Professor Steinberg’s section: This course examines how civil rights lawyers use federal civil rights litigation to address contemporary social problems. Students will develop and litigate a simulated case based on an actual controversy in Detroit where police officers “removed” unhoused individuals from tourist-friendly areas against their will. Students will gain experience in client interviewing, public records requests, writing demand letters, drafting complaints, responding to motions to dismiss, oral argument, depositions, and negotiations. They will also learn how to overcome the many procedural obstacles to justice posed by 42 U.S.C. section 1983 and explore the ethical issues faced by public interest lawyers when representing clients in civil rights cases. The course will emphasize how litigation can be most effective in achieving social change when it is a part of an “integrated advocacy” campaign that includes public education, legislation, and/or community action.

• Type: Practice Simulation

This course will consider problems relating to the police role in the administration of criminal justice and judicial enforcement of limitations upon police practices. We will focus primarily on the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments and will answer the following questions: (1) When can the police stop, search, and/or arrest people? (2) When can the police search cars, homes, and offices and for what? (3) What are the laws surrounding police interrogation and confessions? (4) Who has a right to counsel and when and how is it triggered? (5) How are police line-ups and other identification procedures conducted and what are the constitutional limits on such procedures? (6) What remedy does a defendant have if his/her constitutional criminal procedure rights are violated? When is the evidence excluded and when should it be excluded?

• Type: Upper Class

This course examines the application of legal principles as a limitation on the definition of crime; the theories underlying criminal law; and the problems of the imposition and execution of sentences. Also examined are various specific areas of substantive criminal law, including: (1) general principles applicable to all crimes, e.g., mistake, causation, legal insanity, intoxication, and rules of justification and excuse; (2) accountability for the acts of others; and (3) attempt and conspiracy.

• Type: First Year Required

An analysis of the legal and practical problems presented in the administration of criminal justice from the point of bail to post conviction review. Subjects include: prosecutor’s discretion, preliminary examination, grand jury operations, discovery, joinder and severance of parties and offenses, plea negotiations, acceptance of guilty pleas, selection and role of the jury in criminal trials, selected trial problems, sentencing, appellate and habeas corpus review, and professional responsibilities of the prosecutor and defense attorney.

• Type: Upper Class

Dialoguing across difference is a skill essential for successful lawyering in any specialty, in any context. We must achieve deep understanding of our clients’ perspectives and be able to communicate our own. We must effectively advocate for our clients and negotiate with everyone involved with our clients’ matters, such as their business partners, family members, opposing parties or counsel, etc. We are problem solvers, and often coalition builders and systemic change makers. Students in this course will practice engaging in and facilitating sustained and productive dialogue through the nuanced exploration of their own social/political identities and their perspectives on an assortment of potentially controversial topics of their choosing.

• Type: Practice Simulation

The Law in Slavery and Freedom: A Legal History Practicum
This seminar offers an opportunity to carry out both legal analysis and historical research on a set of issues that have been central to the history of the Americas. We will explore the ways in which slavery, long defined as the ownership of property in human beings, interacted with the structures and practices of law, both in the United States and in Latin America. We will examine how law addressed the category of “slave” and codified the power of slave owners, and how those held as slaves interacted with legal institutions and practices, both civil and criminal.
Course readings include works by legal scholars and historians, as well as files from Supreme Court cases and everyday legal challenges. We will pay particular attention to the cases of The Antelope; Prigg v. Pennsylvania; and The U. S. v. The Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad. We will also examine a state criminal case (Celia, A Slave) and court records from freedom suits, including one from Cuba, one from Louisiana, and one from the period of British rule of the Gold Coast (in what is now Ghana). We will examine voting in the face of terrorist violence during the period of Reconstruction (including U. S. v. Cruikshank).
Students will work together on panels for the presentation of specific cases. Each student will submit a short paper, a research prospectus, and a longer primary source document analysis.

• Type: Seminar

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In 1980, approximately 500,000 people were behind bars in this country. Now, even after significant pandemic-related decarceration, the figure approaches 2 million (nearly two-thirds of whom are non-white), locked up in jails, state prisons, and federal prisons. This course will examine both constitutional law and statutory law relevant to their incarceration. The central topics are the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments and its Fourteenth Amendment analog, and Congress’s regulation of prison-related litigation in the Prison Litigation Reform Act. We’ll also examine First Amendment and related statutory rights behind bars, the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act within prisons and jails, solitary and supermax confinement, race discrimination inside jails and prison, and the law of injunctive relief in constitutional cases brought by incarcerated people. (We will not discuss criminal procedure, habeas corpus, or sentencing.) This course is for anyone interested in civil rights, criminal prosecution, or criminal defense.

• Type: Upper Class

For this one-credit add-on to The Law of Incarceration, students will be linked up to lawyers and advocacy organizations working on prison or jail litigation, and will assist them by performing necessary legal research and writing. Students who took The Law of Incarceration without the practicum in a prior term are welcome to join the current practicum.

• Type: Upper Class