Faith and Democracy

Catalog description

Elective Course Course requirement: paper This is a seminar course designed to explore our most fundamental beliefs and commitments. We will consider how religious faith affects our approach to legal practice, and our conception of our duties as lawyers and citizens. We will explore our beliefs about American democracy, and the role lawyers should play in it, and ask whether those beliefs are traceable to religious or secular faith, or both or neither. This is not a First Amendment course, nor is it a course about black-letter law. We will read a lot, but we will read few (if any) cases. The key question for this course is: Why do we believe what we believe, and how might we act on it during our careers as lawyers and our lives as citizens? A range of religious and secular writings will inform class discussions, and students will be expected to submit one paper at the end of the course.