Jurisprudence I

Catalog description

This course will consider a number of topics residing at the cutting edge where law and legal philosophy meet, including: What is law? Must law be related to morality? What is the interpretative function of courts? Should integrity constrain what courts decide? From whence does the duty to obey law come? Are there any human rights? Might some of these rights by manifested by our ideas of liberty, privacy and freedom of expression? Need we respond to terrorism by changing our values? What is distributive justice as compared with corrective or retributive justice? Are distributive justice questions implicated by court decisions involving affirmative action, gender, and sexual orientation? How is corrective justice manifested in tort and contract law? What is ownership? Is ownership of intellectual property morally justified? What is the relationship of causation to responsibility, and what is punishment and how is it justified. Students may take this three hour course either as a lecture course with a midterm and final exam or a seminar with a 20 page research paper due at the end.