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ADMISSIONS > Courses >
The following social justice and public interest courses are available:
Asian Americans and the Law
In this seminar, students explore how the Asian-American identity is interpolated by and mediated through law and legal norms. What are the contours of the Asian-American representation in culture generally, and in the legal culture specifically? What effect does this identity have on those who bore and continue to bear it? In this seminar, students deal with these theoretical issues, as well as specific loci where the Asian-American identity cogently has come face to face and even clashed with the law and legality; for example: immigration and exclusion, alien land laws, hate crimes, internment and its aftermath, discrimination, and affirmative action. In addition, students examine intersectional issues of the Asian-American identity with gender, sexuality and sexual orientation.
Child Advocacy Seminar
Community Law Practice at the East Bay Community Law Center
The East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC) offers students an opportunity to work in a clinical setting providing free legal services to East Bay residents. The EBCLC focuses on housing law, public benefits, community economic development and legal services for people with AIDS. Students receive training in the substantive legal areas and, under the supervision of staff attorneys, handle their own client caseload.
Constitutional and Civil Rights of Immigrants: Current Issues
This course examines urgent current issues related to immigrants' constitutional and civil rights, including the constitutional framework governing the rights of noncitizens, the degree of protection afforded by federal civil rights laws, and the impact of the dramatic statutory changes enacted by Congress in 1996.
Critical Race Theory
This seminar allows students to explore at an advanced level some of the central debates in critical race theory on such issues as the intractability of racism; the failure of civil rights laws; and the relationship between race, gender and law.
Current Issues in Immigrants' Rights
This course addresses current law and policy issues that affect the rights of immigrants in our society, with special attention to the constitutional rights of immigrants, including the right to due process and equal protection and the right to judicial review. The course also covers the rights of immigrants under labor, employment and antidiscrimination laws.
Death Penalty Clinic
Students in the Death Penalty Clinic assist death-row inmates in need of legal counsel. Under close supervision of the clinic's faculty, students are involved in every aspect of post-conviction work, including visiting clients on death row, interviewing witnesses, examining evidence, researching legal issues, and writing motions and briefs. The accompanying seminar provides a theoretical foundation for the students' work. Topics include substantive capital punishment law, habeas corpus practice and procedure, and the fundamentals of death penalty litigation, including fact investigation, interview techniques and the development of mitigation evidence.
Disability Rights
This course teaches disability rights, an emerging area of civil rights law, exploring the substantive areas of employment, housing, education and access rights. Students will learn practical skills for litigating these civil rights cases.
Domestic Violence Practicum
Students in the Domestic Violence Practicum work in one of several government agencies or nonprofit offices in the Bay Area, or with the instructor on state legislation. They may also assist with post-conviction issues faced by battered women in state prisons. Students interview clients; draft restraining orders, VAWA petitions, memoranda, op-ed pieces and motions; represent clients at hearings; research policy issues; and attend meetings with government officials, judges and legislators.
Students are encouraged to enroll in the companion seminar, Domestic Violence Law.
Domestic Violence Law Recommended Companion Seminar
This course will examine the legal system's response to domestic violence. Students are encouraged to enroll in the Domestic Violence Practicum (Law 295.5Q) as well. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we will cover historical and psychological materials as well as topics in criminal, family, tort, immigration, welfare, and constitutional law. Ethical and policy issues will be included throughout, as will discussion of how domestic violence affects different groups - people of color, disabled women, etc.
Class will include discussion of problems of protective orders, and the efficacy of "mandatory arrest" or "no drop" prosecution policies. In the realm of family law, the class will consider how domestic violence is or should be taken to account in custody proceedings, examining how alternative dispute resolution methods, such as mediation, work or don't work in the context of domestic violence. The class will also look at interstate custody problems affecting battered women who flee with their children.
The course will consider how traditional intentional torts have applied to domestic violence, and the erosion of interspousal immunity. The liability of police departments and other government bodies for failure to enforce protective orders or to otherwise act to protect victims of domestic violence will also be an issue. The class will evaluate welfare issues affecting battered women. The legal rights and problems of immigrant and refugee battered women will also be covered. The pros and cons of medical personnel reporting domestic violence to police will also be addressed. The class will cover battered women as complaining witnesses and as defendants, including the claim of self-defense, and the use of expert testimony on the common experiences of victims of domestic violence.
The class will use the small group discussion format. Several guest speakers and videotapes will be included. Grading will be Credit/ No Credit. A research project in lieu of a final exam is possible. No limit on enrollment.
Employment Discrimination Law
This general survey course explores various state and federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation and disability.
Federal Indian Law
This course concerns the legal relationships among American Indian tribes, the United States, and individual states. Topics covered include the history of American Indian law; conflicting tribal, state and federal jurisdiction over persons and property on Indian lands; tribal sovereignty and self-determination; and natural resources on Indian lands.
International Human Rights
This course provides an introduction to human rights law, policy and institutions and the use of these mechanisms for protecting and promoting human rights. In addition to the focus on core human rights issues, the course will analyze cutting edge legal developments in human rights and the environment, globalization, and corporate responsibility. Students will gain an understanding of the legal norms and procedures in the human rights field, and the activities of nongovernmental organizations in the United
Nations system. Students will have the unique opportunity to develop their research for presentation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
Students should have had a basic international law course. Papers will be required, not a formal exam, but part of the final will be participating in a mock international negotiation.
International Human Rights Law Clinic
Students in the International Human Rights Law Clinic assist survivors of human rights abuses in two ways. First, students represent refugees seeking asylum. Second, they work on innovative human rights projects that advance the struggle for justice on behalf of individuals and marginalized communities that have been the targets of repression and violence. Students prepare and appear in asylum cases, conduct litigation before national and international judicial fora concerning human rights violations, and engage in interdisciplinary empirical studies designed to achieve policy outcomes.
International Human Rights: Law, Policy and Process
The seminar introduces the law and institutional mechanisms for the international protection of human rights, emphasizing international treaty and nontreaty mechanisms for protecting and promoting human rights, including regional systems and the role of nongovernmental organizations. The use of international rights standards in the United States is also addressed.
Labor Law
This course considers the fundamental legal principles affecting labor relations in the private sector workplace, as incorporated in the National Labor Relations Act and related legislation. Several topics will be reviewed, including union organizing and elections, collective bargaining, strikes, boycotts, arbitration and individual employee rights within unions.
Law and Social Justice
This course considers the relationship between law and social justice, asking such questions as: What factors would lawyers and activists consider in making institutional choices (courts versus legislatures versus bureaucracies)? Whatever path is followed toward social justice, how does one measure one's effectiveness? To ground these theoretical questions in real-life practice, the course features presentations by classroom teachers and clinicians associated with Boalt who work in the area of public interest and social justice.
Law of Nonprofit Organizations
This course focuses primarily on the charitable sector, both in the United States and abroad, and the distinctive legal, ethical and policy issues that lawyers for charities are likely to encounter. Students study the law of nonprofit corporations, including the rights and liabilities of directors; charitable trust law and its enforcement; and federal and state tax law as it applies to charities and donors. Ethical and policy issues, including conflicts of interest and practical aspects of counseling charities and their donors, are emphasized.
Public Interest and Nonprofit Organizations
This course focuses on the distinctive legal, ethical and policy issues faced by lawyers representing public interest and charitable organizations. It considers what it means to be a public interest or nonprofit organization and focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of alternative types of organizations, the potential liability of members, obtaining and maintaining most-favored tax-exempt status, directors' duties and liabilities, Attorney General regulation, and the unrelated business income tax.
Race and American Law
This survey course provides an introduction to the dialectics of race and law in the United States. Topics include the emergence and collapse of a slave regime, relations with indigenous peoples, and the role of race in definitions of nationhood as evidenced by immigration and naturalization laws.
Refugee Law
This course examines the root causes of refugee flight and the existing international norms that address human rights abuses and civil strife. Using both an international and a domestic law perspective, students examine the responsibility of nations to accept refugees. The course includes an in-depth examination of refugee law doctrine in the United States, with particular focus on the assessment of individual claims for asylum status.
Reproduction and Sexuality Seminar
In many contexts, the human body is conceptualized as ungendered, but the unarticulated assumption behind the prototype is often male. At the same time, women have traditionally been defined by their bodies far more than men have. Female bodies are regulated in different ways, both inside and outside of the law, than are male bodies. Indeed, women's bodies, or society's conceptions and regulations about women's bodies, have provided much of the historical and legal justification for discriminatory practices. Women's bodies remain the site of much that is contested in law and society today At the heart of these patterns is the fact that the bodies of women are seen as central to the creation and perpetuation of the family. Today, both bodies and the family are changing in response to shifts in technology, values, and the global economy. This course examines the ways in which bodies, the family and the law intersect in these challenging times.
Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic
Students in the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic help shape public policy by developing new legislation, influencing technical standards, engaging in litigation and educating the public. Since the clinic's founding, students have served as advocates on a variety of cutting-edge legal issues, including freedom of speech on the Internet, privacy standards for online and wireless communications, and the effect of intellectual property laws on the global distribution of essential medications.
Sex-Based Discrimination
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.
Sexual Harassment Law
This course examines the substantive law applicable to sexual harassment cases in various settings, with an emphasis on places of employment, but also including schools, housing and public places. Evidentiary and other practical problems in litigating sexual harassment cases are considered, and current developments in the law and their underlying legal theories are analyzed.
Sexual Orientation and the Law
This course explores the relationship between the law and sexual orientation, gender and nonconformity. It examines various legal principles that might be used to limit the ability of government and other institutions to disadvantage people because of their sexual orientation. The course looks at issues such as equal protection and due process/privacy, and explores how courts have used these doctrines in consideration of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender individuals in critical aspects of their lives (employment, housing, family relationships, etc.). It also examines the philosophy that informs each doctrine to see if law ought to be helpful in coping with sexual orientation discrimination and issues of gender.
Social Justice: Skills and Practice Issues
This skills and policy course emphasizes preparing students for public interest practice and the representation of indigent and other marginalized clients.
Social Justice Workshop
The American corporation has lately come under fire for transgressions ranging from unethical accounting at home to use of slave labor abroad. As adversely effected shareholders, employees, host communities, and other third parties seek redress, municipal and international legal systems are pushed to develop accountability mechanisms for corporate social responsibility. The first component of this workshop offers basic corporate law taught from a social justice perspective. Students will learn how the American corporation works with an emphasis on legal mechanisms of accountability. The second component addresses the historical debate about whether the corporation should be held responsible to entities other than the investor in the first place and how economic globalization and global trade and investment regimes inform that debate today. Comprising the bulk of the course, the third workshop component offers a survey of various concrete tools for increasing corporate social responsibility through mechanisms both internal (market-based regulation) and, more critically, external (civil liability, domestic regulation, and international regulation). Here students will learn from practitioners using the Alien Tort Claims Act, the Racketeering Act, California's Garment Workers Statute, and court-ordered codes of conduct. Students will also learn how comparative law and current U.N. initiatives bear on corporate accountability.
Students will learn the material through a combination of lectures, readings, guest experts, and student research. Each student will be required to research a specific mechanism of corporate accountability, write the findings (preferably in the form of a practical guide to implementation), and deliver a class presentation in order to teach fellow workshop participants how to use the mechanism.
Social Justice Writing Seminar: The Role of the Bar Exam in Shaping the Legal Profession
Research shows that significant racial disparities in bar passage rates shape entry into the legal profession. This seminar addresses the implications of this research for social justice lawyering. Students may examine such topics as the relationship of racial disparities to delivery of legal services to underserved communities; the impact, if any, of those disparities on applications by people of color to law school; testing methodologies used to address racial disparities; comparative methods of attorney licensing in other countries; or comparisons of attorney licensing methods with methods used to determine minimal competence in the medical or engineering professions.
Street Law
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