Law, Culture, and Notions of Justice

Here is the intro for my awesome elective with Patricia Williams:

This seminar will look at the challenges that rapidly changing cultural norms present with regard to classical notions of jurisprudence. We will consider the problem in three contexts: crime, religion and science.

1. Crime: We will look at the tension between liberty and security fears; the role of tabloid journalism; and profiling (for both courtroom and medical ends). Topics will include the Central Park Jogger case, the Innocence Project, and the abrogation of habeas corpus.

2. Religion: Here we will examine the legal status of faith-based initiatives; fundamentalism as a linguistic construct and mode of textual analysis; and the interplay between iconography, propaganda and freedom of expression. Topics will include a comparison of Bob Jones University's fight for federal funds case and the Solomon Amendment; cases of "reverse religious discrimination" (e.g., assertions that forbidding prayer in schools interferes with religious expression); comparison of controversies regarding religiously inspired adornment (whether veils, turbans, yarmulkes or tee-shirts) in the US, Britain, and France; and public calls for limitations of expression—from the Danish cartoons to the Westboro Baptist Church's protests at funerals.

3. Science: We will consider how the constructs of personhood, autonomy and community might be informed or altered by cyberspace; how assumptions of political equality may be affected by DNA's growing ability to pinpoint and label every last biological propensity, "defect" and inequality; and last but not least, how the popular discussions of the Human Genome Project's work intersects, for better and worse, with the social discourse of eugenics, race and gender.

Materials will consist of handouts ranging from case law and trial transcripts to newspaper articles, model legislation, and snippets from the disciplines of sociology, linguistics and genetics. The class will be conducted seminar-style, with more discussion than lecture. We will also have a number of guest speakers, still being scheduled. In past incarnations of this class, guests have included essayist Calvin Trillin; former Mayor David Dinkins; Randy Cohen (The New York Times' Ethicist); Nicholas Lehmann, dean of the journalism school; Robert Pollack from the department of neurobiology; and a pair of cartoonists from Marvel Comics discussing the history of the Comic Book Codes.

The class will be graded upon class participation and the submission of three journal-style thought pieces reflecting upon each of the above topics.