AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY SEM

Catalog description

May be used to satisfy the writing requirement. Historians have chronicled the rise and fall of liberalism as the century's dominant American political ideology. Liberal politics created an active state that implemented policies to promote economic and racial egalitarianism. This vision of politics dominated America from the 1930s to the 1970s, but declined in the last three decades of the century. By the end of the century, it had been replaced by neoliberal politics that promoted a smaller role for government in American society and suggested that unleashing individual freedom was the best way to create a fairer and more prosperous society. Political liberalism and neoliberalism generated legal analogues - statutory, administrative, and constitutional regimes that implemented liberal and neoliberal policies. This seminar will examine those structures. It will explore their contours and ask why and how they developed. The course will also investigate the causes of the transition of one regime to the other. The first two meetings of this seminar will be spent exploring the theoretical underpinnings of legal history, and the political and social history of liberalism and neoliberalism. The class will then read and discuss representative pieces of legal history that focus on legal liberalism and legal neoliberalism. We will draw these readings from a broad range of legal-historical subjects. These topics may include constitutional law (e.g., free speech, executive power, equal protection), statutory regimes (e.g., environmental law, labor and employment law, civil rights law, antitrust law, securities regulation), procedural regimes (e.g., administrative law, civil procedure), and issues related to legal education and the legal profession. (This list is representative, not exhaustive.) In addition to this in-class work, students will engage in a writing project. With the professor's guidance, each student will explore a subject of twentieth-century legal history of particular interest to them. This exploration will culminate in a class presentation and a paper on that subject.