This two-semester course is designed to give students a broad introduction to legal scholarship through exposure to current academic writing in a range of fields and close attention to students' own scholarly writing projects. While all students are welcome to apply, the course is especially designed to meet the needs of students interested in an academic career after law school.
The weekly sessions will alternate through the year between (1) open sessions, in which papers are presented by faculty from around the country in law and related fields (sociology, political theory, psychology, philosophy, history, economics, etc.) and (2) closed sessions, in which students will be given a more systematic overview of current modes of legal scholarship, and present their own work as it develops over the course of the year.
Component (1) - the open sessions - is run as a student-faculty colloquium, considering papers on a range of subjects, with the author, enrolled students, faculty, and other auditors present. In addition to participating in the general discussion, students will be expected to submit short (2 - 3 page) reflection pieces most weeks on the paper under consideration that week. Representative topics considered in past years include anti-discrimination law just war, popular constitutionalism, first amendment law, behavioral economics, voting mechanisms, deliberative democracy, and redistributive policy.
The goal of component (2) is to give students a more systematic introduction to legal scholarship and to aid students in producing a piece of legal scholarship of potentially publishable quality. To that end, the bulk of the sessions in the fall semester will be devoted to (a) giving students an overview of scholarly work being done in different areas of the law, through presentations and assigned readings, and (b) discussing possible topics for students' own writing. In the spring, the bulk of attention in these closed sessions will shift to the students' own work. Students will be expected to present their works-in-progress at various stages of development and participate in giving (constructive) feedback to others. The end product will be a substantial paper (35 or more pates) on a topic of the student's choice, due at the end of the spring semester.
NOTE: One grade will be given for the full-year course (6 units), at the end of the spring semester, based on the reflection papers, the long paper due at the end of the year, and class participation.