Seminar in the Federal Practice of Civil Rights/Civil Liberties: Restricted to not more than fifteen students, this seminar is designed to provide students with a professional competence integrating constitutional rights with the federal statutes involved in civil rights litigation in the federal courts. Some of these acts of Congress (e.g., 42 U.S.C. Secs. 1983, 1985(c)) are more than a century old. But in fact, several of these statutes, though adopted merely in the decade following the Civil War, are even today employed more frequently—and frequently more successfully—in private suits seeking damages, class actions, injunctive relief, attorney fees and additional remedies against state entities or persons (whether local police officers, prison personnel, cities, counties, or even state governors) for vindicating civil rights and civil liberties than any of the more modern civil rights acts one ordinarily sees in the newspapers or laws journals (e.g., the modern statutes, all enacted since l964, which provide relief from various forms of discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, voting, education).
The seminar will, however, also integrate several of the major modern acts as well (including those applicable to the private sector), to show just how they “fit” and what their respective advantages (and disadvantages) may be, in deciding which to use. These acts of Congress frequently overlap the older statutes (and often each other as well). —Sorting out which apply in which circumstances, which may take priority over others, and how they relate to each other—as well as to the older acts of Congress—is itself a challenging business the federal courts—including the Supreme Court—continue to struggle to understand.
The ambition of the seminar thus is to provide one with an “integration” of constitutional rights, of civil procedure, federal courts, equal protection doctrines, and of statutory interpretations, giving one a significant head start over others (including many judges) lacking an equivalent sense of how the increasingly complicated area of federal civil rights legislation and litigation currently presents itself. The response over the years, from various federal judges who have had clerks helping them in their work (as well as lawyers before them) who did well in their work in this seminar, has been very positive.